Molecular Medicine and Biotechnology Advances

The journal welcomes contributions from researchers, clinicians, biotechnology innovators, and biomedical engineers working across basic, applied, and translational domains.  Medicine Advances information.  Editorial decisions are based on scholarly merit, scientific rigor, originality, and relevance to human health and disease.

Vision 

Declarations’ section

Declarations' section before the reference list under a heading of ‘Consent to participate’ and/or ‘Consent to publish’. Other declarations include Funding, Competing interests, Ethics approval, Consent, Data and/or Code availability, and Authors’ contribution statements.

• Sample statements for "Consent to participate"
• Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
• Informed consent was obtained from legal guardians.
• Written informed consent was obtained from the parents.
• Verbal informed consent was obtained prior to the interview.
• Sample statements for “Consent to publish”:
• The authors affirm that human research participants provided informed consent for publication of the images in Figure(s) 1a, 1b, and 1c.
• The participant has consented to the submission of the case report to the journal.
• Patients signed informed consent forms regarding the publication of their data and photographs.

Sample statements if identifying information about participants is available in the article:

Additional informed consent was obtained from all individual participants for whom identifying information is included in this article. Authors are responsible for the correctness of the statements provided in the manuscript. The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to reject submissions that do not meet the guidelines described in this section. Images will be removed from publication if authors have not obtained informed consent, or the paper may be removed and replaced with a notice explaining the reason for removal.

Declaration of competing interests

All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence or bias their work. Examples of Potential competing interests include:

• Employment
• Consultancies
• Stock ownership
• Honoraria
• Paid expert testimony
• Patent applications or registrations
• Grants or any other funding
• Affiliation with the journal as an Editor or Advisory Board Member
• The declarations tool should always be completed.

Funding sources

Authors must disclose any funding sources that provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article. The role of sponsors, if any, should be declared in relation to the study design, collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, writing of the report, and decision to submit the article for publication. If funding sources had no such involvement, this should be stated in your submission. List funding sources in this standard way to facilitate compliance to funder's requirements:

Funding: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA [grant number zzzz]; and the United States Institute of Peace [grant number xxx]. It is not necessary to include detailed descriptions of the program or of the types of grants, scholarships, and awards. When funding is from a block grant or other resources available to a university, college, or other research institution,submit the name of the institute or organization that provided the funding. If no funding has been provided for the research, it is recommended to include the The following sentence:

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Declaration of generative AI use

Authors must declare the use of generative AI tools in the manuscript preparation process upon submission of the paper.

Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies (“AI tools”) have been rapidly adopted in research and scholarly publishing, offering significant benefits while requiring clear standards for responsible and transparent use. Authors preparing a manuscript for this journal may use AI tools to support them. However, these tools must never be used as a substitute for human critical thinking, expertise, and evaluation. AI tools may be used only with human oversight and control. Finally, authors must not list or cite AI tools as authors or co-authors on the manuscript, since authorship implies responsibilities and tasks that can only be attributed to and performed by humans. The use of AI tools in the manuscript preparation process must be declared by adding a statement at the end of the manuscript upon first submission. The statement will appear in the published work and should be placed in a new section before the references list. An example:

Title of new section: Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the manuscript preparation process.

Statement: During the preparation of this work, the author(s) used [NAME OF TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the published article.

The declaration does not apply to the use of basic tools, such as those for checking grammar, spelling, and references. In addition, authors are not required to disclose the use of AI tools or features within specialist disability-related assistive technology, provided that such tools or features are used solely for accessibility purposes. If you have nothing to disclose, you do not need to add a statement.

Studies in humans

Authors must follow ethical guidelines for research involving humans, their data, and/or their biological materials (e.g. organs, tissues).  Authors should ensure that they adhere to the following: 

All studies must be performed in compliance with relevant laws, regulations, and institutional guidelines, and the appropriate institutional committee(s) has/have approved them.  For instance, medical research involving humans should be carried out in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.

Ethical principles for medical research involving human participants should follow the Molecular Medicine and Biotechnology Advances (Mol. Med. Biotechnol. Adv.) recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing and publication of scholarly work in medical journals and aim to be representative of human populations in terms of sex, age and ethnicity. Sex and gender terms should be used correctly, as outlined in the “Reporting Sex- and Gender-based analyses” section of this journals. 

Guide for Authors 

Informed consent must be obtained for research involving human participants, including  the use of their data or biological materials.  Consent must be given without coercion, and the  privacy rights of human participants must always be observed.  Authors should be aware that  written (or electronic) consent is required for certain studies under national laws.  In studies where  only verbal informed consent was obtained, the authors should include justification for the absence of written consent, the name of the approving ethics committee, and a statement on how verbal consent was recorded.  Authors must obtain and retain explicit written consent for any identifiable  participant materials (e.g., case details, videos, recordings, images, photographs, and illustrations).   

All participant information must be de-identified: do not include names or personal identifiers (e.g., initials, ID numbers, DOB).  Images should be used only when scientifically necessary and with explicit consent, and nonessential identifying details must be removed.  If identifiers are altered to ensure anonymity, authors must confirm that scientific meaning is not affected.  Fully anonymized images (e.g., x-rays, scans) that contain no identifying marks and are not accompanied by identifying text do not require formal consent, though informing the patient is good practice.  Case reports always require consent.  Simply obscuring identity (e.g., eye bars or blurring) is not sufficient without consent. Written consents must be retained by the authors. They should not be provided to this journal unless this is specifically requested in exceptional circumstances, for example, when a legal issue arises.  Only then should you provide copies of the consents or evidence that all relevant consents were obtained.  In many countries, additional ethical approval may be needed for research with those who lack the capacity to consent (e.g., children or those with mental health or neurological conditions, including dementia).

All studies involving human participants require a statement that details any ethical approval(s), guidelines followed, and confirmation of informed consent. The statement should contain the date and reference number of any ethical approval(s) obtained. If ethical approval is not required by national laws, or where a study has been granted an exemption from an ethics committee, the statement must explain why the study is exempt and confirm that the appropriate protocols for protecting the rights and privacy of all participants were utilized during the execution of the research (e.g. no coercion to participate, full disclosure of study requirements and risks, consent of participants (or their Legal Representatives), no release of participant data without their knowledge, etc.). 

Human biological material

For all studies that use human organs or tissues, sufficient evidence must be provided that these were procured in line with WHO Guiding Principles on Human Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation. The source of the organs or tissues used in clinical research must be transparent and traceable and must not be sourced from executed prisoners or prisoners of conscience, consistent with recommendations by Global Rights Compliance on Mitigating Human Rights Risks in Transplantation Medicine.  For clinical studies, a statement of informed consent having been obtained from a patient or their legal representative, paired with ethical approval for the study from a suitable institution, as required by the policies of the journal, may be considered sufficient evidence, but the journal reserves the right to request additional evidence in cases where it feels this is not sufficient.  If the manuscript describes organ transplantation, authors must additionally declare within the manuscript that:  Autonomous consent, free from coercion, was obtained from the donor(s) or their next of kin. Organs and/or tissues were not sourced from executed prisoners or prisoners of conscience.

Clinical Trials 

Registration:  Clinical trials must be registered in a public trial registry.  Purely observational studies, in which the assignment of the medical intervention is not at the discretion of the investigator, do not require registration. 

Some important points

Trials must be registered at or before the onset of patient enrolment.  The clinical trial registration number must be included in the manuscript, preferably at the end of the article abstract. A clinical trial is defined as any research study that prospectively assigns human participants, or groups of humans, to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects of health  outcomes.  Health-related interventions include any measures used to modify biomedical or health related outcomes, such as drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, dietary interventions, and process-of-care changes.