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In this Tools of the Trade article, Isabel Esain-Garcia describes the development and use of a 6-letter whole-genome sequencing technology, which enables the simultaneous acquisition of genetic and epigenetic information from human genomic and cell-free DNA, which has implications for improving our biological understanding of cancer as well as cancer diagnosis and early intervention.
This Review outlines risk factors and prevention strategies for cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) and highlights recent advances in the understanding of the impact of molecular and cellular intra-tumour heterogeneity that provide the basis for new therapeutic strategies to treat advanced cSCC.
In this Perspective article, Mel Greaves and co-workers outline emerging evidence that suggests that children with newly diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia may have a delayed maturation of the gut microbiome compared with healthy children, a deficit that might be associated with early-life epidemiological factors and could contribute to the risk of transformation of preleukaemic clones in response to common infectious triggers.
In this Perspective, the authors suggest that different tumour microenvironments have ‘archetypal’ qualities across all cancers — characteristic and repeating collections of cells and gene-expression profiles at the level of the bulk tumour. They propose the existence of 12 dominant immune archetypes.
In this Tool of the Trade article, Eva Freckmann describes the development of Traject3d, a workflow that enables the detection of heterogeneous phenotypes in 3D culture by analysing label-free multi-day time-lapse imaging.
In this Review, Schwenck et al. discuss how PET imaging of cancer has advanced through its combination with CT and MRI and the development of an array of imaging probes, and how these innovations now need to be fully integrated into the clinic to improve cancer diagnostics and guide therapy.
In this study, Insco et al. find patient-specific CDK13 mutations to impede RNA surveillance, leading to the accumulation and translation of prematurely terminated RNAs that drive malignancy in melanoma models.
In this Review, Banushi et al. discuss how endocytotic pathways impact many cancer processes including nutrient scavenging, metastasis and therapeutic drug delivery, and how knowledge of these pathways can be used to improve cancer therapy in the clinic.
Sloan and colleagues demonstrate that anthracycline chemotherapy drives metastatic progression by stimulating a cancer cell-mediated increase in nerve fibre activity in the tumour microenvironment, which can be reversed by the use of β-blockers.
In a recent study on castration-resistant prostate cancer, Cui et al. uncover a role for cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in inducing androgen synthesis in prostate cancer cells.
In a recent Nature study, Hill et al. provide mechanistic evidence that air pollution promotes lung tumorigenesis in cells with pre-existing oncogenic mutations.
Eukaryotic initiation factor 4F (eIF4F) controls the translation of a subset of transcripts that include those encoding oncogenic proteins. In this Perspective article, Bartish et al. discuss the implications of targeting eIF4F on immune and stromal cells in the tumour microenvironment. In addition to discussing data from cancer models, the authors incorporate extensive data from non-cancer contexts to identify potential desirable or unwanted effects of eIF4F inhibition in these cells.
Although metastasis is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths, our understanding of the process is limited. In this Review, Hebert et al. discuss the key features of various models of metastasis, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages for further dissecting mechanisms of metastasis and developing metastasis-targeted therapies.
In this Tools of the Trade article, Zhenqin Wu describes the development and use of SPACE-GM, a graph deep learning tool that enables the detection of spatial cellular structures predictive of outcomes of patients with cancer.
Blanpain and colleagues provide evidence that the small RHO GTPase, RHOJ, mediates resistance to chemotherapy in tumour cells that have undergone epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition by enabling these cells to tolerate replicative stress and promote DNA damage repair.
This Review outlines how the developmental pathways that are involved in melanocyte development and skin pigmentation are highjacked by melanoma cells to drive melanomagenesis, progression and therapy resistance.
