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Beyond the laboratory bench, cancer researchers will face big challenges during their careers. Nature Reviews Cancer has published two Viewpoint articles to highlight some of these wider issues.
Using ovarian and breast cancer models, Barkal et al. identify CD24 as a novel anti-phagocytic ‘don’t eat me’ signal on tumour-associated macrophages that orchestrates an innate immune checkpoint to modulate antitumour immunity, highlighting the promise of CD24 blockade as an immunotherapy strategy.
Increased extracellular matrix stiffness has long been associated with malignant transformation in breast cancer. Now, Stowers et al. have shown that matrix stiffness induces a tumorigenic phenotype by affecting the epigenetic landscape of a cell.
Balanis, Sheu and colleagues show that small-cell neuroendocrine cancers converge on a common molecular phenotype across epithelial tissues and share therapeutic vulnerabilities with haematological cancers, revealing unique opportunities to guide the development of new treatments based on existing blood cancer therapies.
Boettcher et al. show that missense mutations in the DNA-binding domain of TP53 lead to a dominant-negative effect in leukaemia, where mutant p53, instead of activating de novo transcriptional programmes, inhibits the wild-type protein, thereby driving clonal selection.
Zheng et al. have developed a phage-guided nanoparticle approach to modulate tumour-associated bacterial species and deliver chemotherapy for local release. This strategy was able to suppress tumour growth in mouse models of colorectal cancer.
In a study published in Cell, Riquelme et al. unravel intratumoural microbial events associated with long-term survival in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and illustrate that tumour microbiome composition, which is influenced by gut–tumour microbial crosstalk, influences the host immune response and natural history.
Yost, Satpathy et al. show that the T cell response to immune checkpoint blockade consists of a repertoire of novel T cell clones, which are distinct from pre-existing exhausted T cell clones, and were not detected in the tumour before treatment.
In this Viewpoint article, we asked four female scientists to describe their experiences of gender representation during their scientific careers and to identify the challenges and possible solutions to empowering women in cancer research and science more generally.
This Review discusses how circulating tumour cell (CTC) analysis at single-cell resolution provides unique insights into tumour heterogeneity that are not revealed by analysis of circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) derived from liquid biopsies.
Innate immune checkpoints, including those regulating tumour detection and phagocytosis, have emerged as potential cancer immunotherapy targets. This Review discusses the role of phagocytosis checkpoints in cancer immune evasion, highlighting the preclinical and early clinical evidence supporting phagocytosis checkpoint blockade.
Previous nanomedicine approaches have attempted to concentrate the action of cytotoxic therapies at tumours, generally with limited success. This Review discusses how the field is evolving to use nanoparticles and biomaterials to program the location, pharmacokinetics and co-delivery of immunotherapies, eliciting responses that cannot be achieved upon administration of such compounds in solution.
