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Despite the profound clinical success of immune-checkpoint inhibitors, their effectiveness is limited by intrinsic and acquired resistance. Bullman, Zitvogel and colleagues provide their views on two clinical trials modulating the microbiome of immunotherapy-resistant patients with melanoma via transplantation of fecal microbiota from patients who responded to immunotherapy.
Despite substantial advances in understanding of the molecular features of gliomas, the therapeutic options for these aggressive tumors remain scarce. Rich, Mitchell and colleagues provide their views about a phase 1 clinical trial testing the safety and efficacy of vaccines against cancer expressing mutant metabolic enzyme IDH1 in patients with high-grade glioma.
Although RET alterations are relatively frequent across tumor types, specific targeting of RET in the clinic has been challenging. Ambrogio, Aggarwal and colleagues provide their views on how mechanistic studies have swiftly translated into powerful targeted therapies in two recent clinical studies that led to the FDA approval of selpercatinib for certain tumors in which RET is altered.
Although cancer genomics is a powerful tool to understand cancer and develop diagnostic tools, the contribution of the microbiome in cancer diagnosis and clinical assessment is much less studied. Elinav, Greten and colleagues provide their respective views on how studying cancer metagenomes could facilitate identification, diagnosis and staging of different tumor types.
A new suite of studies from the Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium provides the most detailed resolution of cancer genomes to date, extending our knowledge of driver genes, mutational features, structural alterations and more. Kreisberg, Ideker, Mills and Meric-Bernstam discuss the foundational and translational insights gained from this project.
KRAS mutations are among the most prevalent tumor drivers, but targeting them pharmacologically has been challenging. Recent landmark studies have demonstrated promising clinical results of KRASG12C inhibition by using small molecules. Bar-Sagi, and Knelson and Sequist provide their distinct perspectives on this recent tour de force in targeting KRASG12C alterations.
