Volume 11 Issue 4, April 2011

Angelika Amon and colleagues have isolated drugs that selectively target aneuploid cells.

Three papers show that HiPSCs differ at the genetic and epigenetic levels compared with HESCs.

Galon and colleagues correlate different subsets of T cells with clinical outcome of patients with colorectal cancer.

The DNA repair protein 53BP1 marks regions of under-replicated DNA in the G1 phase of the cell cycle.

A new study suggests that internalization of one cell into another (entosis) may not have the tumour-suppressive effect that it was assumed to have. Instead, entosis leads to aneuploidy and can have tumour-promoting effects.

CD4⁺regulatory T cells promote mammary tumour metastasis through intratumoural RANKL expression.

Two papers describe how wounds 'call' stem cells with the ability to initiate tumours out of their niches.

Radiotherapy is the most common treatment for cancer patients, and so methods to improve responses are an important challenge. This Review discusses strategies to modulate tumour responses to radiotherapy with radiosensitizers and how normal tissue responses to ionizing radiation can be repressed with radioprotectors.

CD44 has been implicated as a cancer-initiating cell (CIC; also known as a cancer stem cell) marker in several malignancies of haematopoietic and epithelial origin. Is this a fortuitous coincidence owing to the widespread expression of the molecule or is CD44 expression advantageous?

The unique ability of human pluripotent stem cells to self-renew and to differentiate into cells of the three germ layers makes them an invaluable tool for the future of regenerative medicine and tumorigenic research. It was assumed that human induced pluripotent stem cells (HiPSCs) would behave like their embryonic counterparts in respect to their tumorigenicity, but a rapidly accumulating body of evidence suggests that there are important differences.

Recent genome-wide association studies have implicated six gene loci in the development of testicular germ cell tumours (TGCTs). The function of the proteins encoded by genes at these loci bridge our understanding between the pathways involved in primordial germ cell physiology, male germ cell development and the molecular pathology of TGCTs.

PTENis one of the most frequently inactivated tumour suppressor genes in cancer, and approximately 80% of patients with Cowden syndrome have mutations inPTEN. This Review discusses the different types of PTEN-mutant tumours that occur in Cowden syndrome and the mouse models that have been engineered to study them.

This article proposes a new method for biobanking in which samples and associated data could be deposited anonymously and labelled using a PIN code produced on the basis of personal biological characteristics. This method might help to diminish several long standing ethical, legal and societal problems in biobanking.