The welfare of animals used for research must be respected. Animal experiments should abide by the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals. For research manuscripts in Cancer Biology & Medicine reporting experiments on animals, the authors must confirm that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Manuscripts must include a statement in materials and methods section that the research has been reviewed and approved by institutional ethical committee before conduction.

Experiments on human subjects should follow the Helsinki Declaration (as revised in 2013) and should be approved by an ethics committee. Concerning privacy and/or security of personal information, informed consents and permissions must be obtained in regard to case details, personal information, and/or images used. When reporting studies that involve human participants, authors should include a statement that the studies have been approved by the appropriate institutional and/or national research ethics committee and have been conducted in accordance with Declaration of Helsinki. For manuscripts reporting biomedical research involving human subjects, a statement that the informed consent was obtained from each subject is required. If the study is a clinical trial, the trial must be registered in an appropriate registry prior to the start of the trial. Authors should provide ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier in the manuscript.

For all research involving human subjects, informed consent should be obtained from participants or their legal guardian and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript. Informed consent must comply with all applicable laws and regulations concerning the privacy and/or security of personal information. Patients' names, initials, social security numbers, dates of birth or other personal or identifying information should not be used. Images of patients should not be used unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and explicit permission has been given as part of the consent. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential.