Despite witnessing great leaps in recent years in how we can measure and quantify biological systems with great accuracy and precision – we’re only at the beginning stages of interrogating the vast complexity of the genome and cascading proteome, transcriptome, metabolome and as we cover later in this issue – the ‘connectome’. Not knowing enough, is, I would argue, a position of strength not weakness, propelling us to discover the ‘unknown unknowns’, pushing us to find solutions to intractable problems.

The focus of this issue is centered on the rapidly evolving area of minimal residual disease but as was pointed out in one of our interviews, when you’re looking at numbers close to a million or so cancer cells it’s hard to argue there is anything minimal about that analysis at all.