Research Highlights in 2023

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.

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.

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.

In this study, Weems et al. demonstrate that detachment-induced dynamic blebbing leads to the assembly of pro-survival signalling molecules at the plasma membrane, which protects melanoma cells from anoikis.

Han et al. employed an in vivo imaging workflow that coupled positron emission tomography imaging to micro-computed tomography and 3D serial block-face electron microscopy to produce a detailed structural and functional map of mitochondrial networks in lung cancer.

In this study, Bhardwaj et al. highlight the mechanistic link between elevated body mass index and breast epithelial cell DNA damage in individuals carrying BRCA mutations.

In this study, the authors investigate the mechanistic basis of alternative telomere lengthening, a process that certain cancer cells use to overcome telomere shortening.

Altea-Manzano et al. find that factors secreted by primary breast tumours or high-fat diet feeding enriches the fatty acid palmitate in distant organs, which primes pre-metastatic niches enabling metastatic growth.

In this study, Linde et al. demonstrate how therapeutic activation of neutrophils leads to tumour eradication and reduced metastatic seeding in multiple mouse models of cancer.

In this study, Jung-Garcia et al. use in vitro and in vivo modelling to demonstrate the role of LAP1 in promoting melanoma cell invasion and highlight its link to metastatic dissemination.

This study shows how the selective immune pressure in early-stage tumours drives interferon-γ-dependent metabolic reprogramming in cancer cells to mediate immune escape.

To understand malignant progression, Yuan et al. delineate the complex crosstalk between cancer stem cells and their microenvironment that is initiated by oncogenic RAS.