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This Review discusses how excessive signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) activation within cancer cells and cells of the tumour microenvironment can be viewed as a neoplastic mimic of an inflammation-driven repair response that promotes tumour progression.
This Review discusses causal germline variants in prostate cancer identified through genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and post-GWAS analyses. The latter are vital to identify causal variants and molecular mechanisms by which these variants promote prostate tumorigenesis, with potential clinical applications.
In this Review, Altorki et al. discuss how the tumour-reprogrammed lung microenvironment can contribute to primary lung tumour progression as well as lung metastasis from extrapulmonary neoplasms by promoting inflammation, angiogenesis, immune modulation and therapeutic responses.
This Review discusses the interdependencies of mTOR signalling and metabolism pathways in cancer and how metabolic reprogramming in response to changes in mTOR signalling and vice versa can sustain tumorigenicity. The authors highlight therapeutic opportunities when targeting metabolism and mTOR.
Therapy with live tumour-targeting bacteria represents a unique opportunity to address the limitations associated with molecularly targeted therapies and immunotherapies. In this Review, Zhou et al. discuss the benefits and challenges of this approach and outline advances in the engineering of bacteria, which have the potential to improve safety and efficacy.
This Review discusses the 2018 Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) Cancer Gene Census (CGC), an expert-curated description of human cancer genes, which has recently been expanded to include functional descriptions of how each gene contributes to cancer.
This Review discusses how cells with stem cell characteristics often serve as the tumour cell of origin, as they are preferentially primed for transformation. Furthermore, the activation of stem cell programmes can be crucial for promoting cancer progression and therapy resistance.
This Review discusses the reprogramming of the urea cycle, the main metabolic liver pathway for nitrogen disposal, in cancer cells. The authors provide insight into the metabolic advantages and therapeutic opportunities stemming from urea cycle enzyme perturbations in cancer.
This Review discusses new insights into molecular mechanisms that link the dysregulation of polyamine metabolism with carcinogenesis and strategies for targeting this pathway for cancer therapy.
Cancer is ubiquitous in wildlife and is an increasing concern for endangered species. This Review discusses the impact of cancer on animal species and highlights how studying these effects could reveal shared mechanisms of cancer predisposition between animals and humans.
This Review discusses nutrient scavenging, a process by which cancer cells use macromolecules from their environment to fuel cell metabolism and growth even when nutrients are limiting.
In this Review, Di Virgilio et al. describe how extracellular ATP and P2 purinergic signalling can shape the tumour microenvironment to both promote and restrain tumour progression and outline the opportunities to harness nucleotide receptor signalling as an anticancer strategy.
In this Review, Hamidi and Ivaska discuss the contribution of integrins to the different steps of cancer progression, highlighting some of the recently identified unconventional roles of integrins and novel opportunities to target integrin signalling.
This Review discusses the origins of squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), with a focus on skin, lung, oesophageal and head and neck cancer, and describes how oncogenic mutations and the cell of origin cooperate in determining the rise of SCC.
In this Review, Greaves describes the evidence supporting the model that infections early in life reduce the risk of childhood common B cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (BCP-ALL) development. Given this evidence, paediatric BCP-ALL may be a preventable cancer.
Although the aggressive underlying biology of inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) remains largely undefined, the tumour microenvironment (TME) has emerged as a key contributor. This Review discusses intrinsic characteristics of IBC, extrinsic features of the TME and intrinsic–extrinsic communication.
In this Review, Drost and Clevers discuss the recent advances in organoid models of cancer and how they can be exploited to drive the translation of basic cancer research into novel patient-specific treatment regimens in the clinic.
The MET oncogene encodes a receptor tyrosine kinase with pleiotropic functions. In this Review, Comoglio et al. describe the known and novel MET-mediated biological responses in cancer and discuss how clinical trials testing anti-MET therapies should be designed with careful consideration of these oncogenic functions of MET.
In this Review, Stueltenet al. outline insights with relevance to human cancer invasion and metastasis that have come from the study of cell motility in non-mammalian model organisms.
