Reviews & Analysis

This Opinion proposes that temporal variations in intratumoural blood flow are the result of eco-evolutionary dynamics. It describes adaptive strategies to stochastically varying environments that may strongly affect observed cancer phenotypes and clinical outcomes including formation of metastases and response to treatment.

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.

This Opinion discusses the role of the primary cilium as a platform for pathways implicated in cancer and how changes in the ciliation of cells in the tumour microenvironment can affect cancer progression.

In this Opinion, Joshi et al. argue that in cancer cells, a state of chaperome hyperconnectivity is obtained by increasing the interaction strength among chaperome machinery members. These chaperome scaffolding platforms act to increase the functional diversity of oncogenic processes and have implications for the development of chaperome inhibitors.

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.

In this Opinion article, Hosny et al. discuss the application of artificial intelligence to image-based tasks in the field of radiology and consider the advantages and challenges of its clinical implementation.

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 Timeline article, Maman and Witz describe how much progress has been made in understanding how the tumour microenvironment influences tumour progression since its initial description, highlighting the controversies in the field and the potential of targeting components of the microenvironment for cancer therapy.

In this Opinion article, Twumasi-Boateng et al. discuss the use of oncolytic viruses as multiplexed immune-modulating platforms with the potential to improve the effectiveness of immunotherapies through novel synergistic mechanisms promoting antitumour immune activity.

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.

This Opinion discusses studies indicating a direct role of RB in chromatin regulation and DNA repair. The authors propose that a non-canonical RB pathway exists, which is independent of the function of RB in cell cycle regulation and which contributes to cancer progression.

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.

This Opinion article highlights how activating mutations in the gene encoding oestrogen receptor-α (ERα), a major driver in breast cancer, undermine structural features of wild-type ERα that maintain the ‘off-state’ in the absence of oestrogens, thus making ERα constitutively active and endocrine-therapy resistant.

This Opinion argues for a new look at the role of ABC transporters in cancer multidrug resistance to push forward their clinical application as biomarkers and as targets in combination therapies in order to improve anticancer drug efficiency.

This Perspective provides an update on targeted therapy development for neuroblastoma and proposes that clinical trial design needs to be rethought in order to provide rigorous, evidence-based assessment of these new therapies in this rare and often deadly paediatric tumour.

In this Opinion article, Seluanov et al. discuss the diverse mechanisms of cancer resistance found in long-lived mammals and argue that studies of unconventional long-lived and cancer-resistant animal species could provide breakthroughs in cancer therapy and prevention.

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.

In this Opinion article, Donnemet al. outline the evidence for non-angiogenic tumours, which use pre-existing blood vessels to support tumour growth, and discuss the studies that are beginning to define their unique biology.

Head and neck cancer is an unexpectedly heterogeneous disease. In this Review, Leemans, Snijders and Brakenhoff provide an update on the molecular biology of head and neck cancer, outline the role of human papillomavirus and discuss the functional role of genes involved in malignant progression to identify subgroups to personalize treatment.

To efficiently prevent cancers associated with human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, especially cervical cancer, effective vaccines and high vaccination coverage are required. This Review provides insight into virological, immunological and strategical progress in HPV vaccines as well as implementation and potential advances.