Our silver jubilee/anniversary 1991–2016

After a 3-year period of incubation, the journal, Inflammopharmacology, was launched in 1991. The timing was particularly appropriate as a related journal, Agents and Actions, formerly Helvetica Pharmaceutica Acta, was to mutate into a more physiological journal called “Inflammation Research”. The pharmacological and toxicological aspects of inflammation and its regulation by medicinal xenobiotics were then deemed worthy of a better fate than being lost by neglect.

Very fortunately, Kim Rainsford, then working in Cambridge UK, was approached to undertake establishing a journal with its emphasis on reporting developments of inflammation regulation and relevant therapeutics. He graciously accepted this responsibility, bringing his many gifts to launching and sustaining this new publishing venture. His tenacity is shown by the fact that he is still Editor-in-Chief today.

It began with MTP Press, Lancaster UK, as the first publisher, migrated to be published in Dordrecht, Holland by Kluwer; then, a later move to VSP Publishers in Utrecht, Holland which then became part of Brill, also in Holland. Finally, it was brought back to Switzerland in 2005 to Birkhäuser, Basel and later subsumed into the Springer, Basel AG later to become Springer Nature, Heidelberg, Germany. From here, it ventured into simultaneous electronic publication.

For the past 12 years, Hans Detlef Klueber, Basel, Switzerland first acted as ‘midwife’ and then sustained of this latter connection with the Springer Publishing Company. We owe him much for his diligence and dedication.

Some exceptional research reports and reviews were to follow over the years. If downloads and citations are any guide to a journal’s success, then Table 3 in the accompanying article by Kim Rainsford highlights some relevant data. The Journal now has a citation index of 2.304.

Looking to the future—and perhaps a golden jubilee in 2041—we may well wonder if print/electronic/? other forms of publishing will be used to meet the needs of future researchers who need to know what are still the favoured drugs/hormones to control Pain, Inflammation, Tissue Healing; perhaps together with novel approaches to treating, these aberrations from normal homeostasis with yet other strategies—of which we can only dream at present. For example, who would have guessed as recently as 5 years ago that faecal transplants might now be routinely used to down-regulate some forms of chronic bowel inflammation by re-adjusting the intestinal microbiome. Other innovative medico-surgical practises are certainly sure to follow, taking our focus from synthetic chemicals, natural products or engineered proteins/polynucleotides to re-adjusting the ‘norm’ by other strategies relevant to that individual’s constitution and environmental exposure(s). The remarkable saga of insult and adaption that we call ‘Inflammation’ will probably still be central to the Journal's focus upon the basis of health and wellbeing.

Floreat IPH.

Appendix

This Journal has published reports about the properties and potential of anti-microbial silver pharmaceuticals for controlling experimental inflammation (Whitehouse et al. 2013) and pro-arthritic bacteria (Disannayake et al. 2014). It has previously published clinical reports about the anti-inflammatory properties of silver’s two companion metals in Group 11 of the Periodic Table, namely, copper (Weiping et al. 1997) and gold (Kean and Kean 2008). Before there were any scientific publications in European languages, these other two noble/coinage metals (along with silver) had long histories of use in medicine (Whitehouse 2015a).

Therefore, one challenge presented in, and following, the Silver Anniversary of Inflammopharmacology is to establish some boundaries for the safe use of silver pharmaca, such as for treating/preventing chronic inflammatory disorders, e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, multiple sclerosis, etc., that may be initiated or sustained by microbial infection (Whitehouse 2015b).