In response to a questionnaire that you may have received recently, we have responded to provide you with more of the elements of the old newsletter that you most valued and introduced new features that you indicated you would like.

To encapsulate the findings of the survey, we found that the most valued part of the newsletter was the review articles. As a result, we will commit to providing at least 30% more articles in the coming year than you had in the past 12 months. We will continue to theme this content as we believe that this has been an element of the mailing that many of you have enjoyed.

We hope that you will find the layout of this new-style newsletter clear and easy to access and that we continue to provide you with the high quality content to which you have become accustomed. In addition, we will now supply you with what we consider to be the most important news stories that have been included on the Drug Discovery Today website in the past month. I hope that you will enjoy this and find it useful.

As always, I am keen to hear your feedback on the changes in this service that we provide to you; please feel free to email your observations to me, Dr Steve Carney, at s.carney@elsevier.com. I look forward to being able to read your comments.

As you can see, this issue of Drug Discovery Today: Editor’s Choice deals with the subject of Molecular biological approaches to treating disease and features the following articles: ‘siRNAs: their potential as therapeutic agents – Part I. Designing of siRNAs’, by Praveensingh B. Hajeri and Sunit Kumar Singh; the second article is the follow up article by the same authors and is entitled ‘siRNAs: their potential as therapeutic agents – Part II. Methods of delivery’.

Finally, we include two other articles, the first by Pin-I Huang, Ju-Fang Chang, David H. Kirn and Ta-Chiang Liu on ‘Targeted genetic and viral therapy for advanced head and neck cancers’ and the second by Fabrício F. Costa on ‘Non-coding RNAs and new opportunities for the private sector’.

I hope that these articles give you a flavour of the field of molecular biological approaches to the treatment of disease and I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

Best wishes,
Steve Carney

Steve Carney was born in Liverpool, England and studied Biochemistry at Liverpool University, obtaining a BSc.(Hons). He then read for a PhD on the Biochemistry and Pathology of Connective Tissue Diseases in Manchester University. On completion of his PhD he moved to the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, London 1, where he worked with Professor Helen Muir FRS on the biochemistry of experimental Osteoarthritis. Later, he joined Eli Lilly and Co. where he stayed for 15 years and held a number of positions in Biology R&D, initially in Connective Tissue, but later in Neuroscience. He left Lilly in 2002 to take up his present position as Managing Editor, Drug Discovery Today, at Elsevier. He has authored over 40 peer-reviewed articles, written several book chapters and has held a number of patents.