News & Comment

Barkley and colleagues conducted single-cell RNA sequencing of almost 20,000 malignant cells and identified cancer cell states that are both common and different across tumour types, and revealed how these states interact with the tumour microenvironment.

Seki et al. show that exposure to cold suppresses tumour growth in mice through increasing glucose uptake and thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Anne C. Rios describes the development of multispectral large-scale single-cell resolution three-dimensional (mLSR-3D) imaging and the analytical pipeline, segmentation analysis by parallelization of 3D datasets (STAPL-3D), which enables the extraction of hundreds of molecular, spatial and volumetric features from millions of cells imaged in 3D, revealing details of the structural organization of human tumours.

In this Comment article, Bhangu and Caduff describe how the social science of medical anthropology uses qualitative methods to better understand how people in different parts of the world perceive and experience illness, and how this field of study emphasizes research approaches that humanize and add richness to our understanding of cancer in complex settings.

Venkataramani et al. used longitudinal intravital two-photon imaging to track migrating glioblastoma cells in vivo, and identified a seemingly unconnected cell subpopulation that was responsible for colonization of the brain by mimicking neuronal mechanisms of movement.

Using single-cell transcriptomic data, Joanito et al. reveal that colorectal cancers can be defined by the presence of one of two major intrinsic epithelial subtypes, and present a refined molecular classification system for these cancers.

Finding sex differences in the response of patients with melanoma to BRAF/MEK-targeted therapy, Vellano et al. show that this effect is mediated by androgen receptor expression and demonstrate that androgen receptor blockers can enhance treatment response.

Diamantopoulou et al. have found that in both mouse models and patients with breast cancer, the timing of spontaneous circulating tumour cell production coincides with sleep.

Zhang et al. demonstrate that the adenosine deaminase ADAR1 prevents responsiveness to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) through acting on cellular Z-nucleic acids, and show inducing Z-nucleic acid formation can induce tumour sensitivity to ICB.

In this Journal Club, Kanaan and Copeland discuss a study showing that a high 1,25(OH)₂D:25(OH)D molar ratio, indicative of vitamin D metabolism, is inversely related to the risk of highly aggressive prostate cancer in African American men.

Chen et al. show that gliomagenesis in the olfactory bulb of the brain is directly related to olfactory perception in mice.

Reticker-Flynn et al. show that exposure of melanoma cells to interferons and immune cells within lymph nodes leads to immune tolerance that promotes metastasis of both these cells and primary tumour cells.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Amir Giladi describes the development and use of PIC-seq, which enables the direct enrichment and analysis of conjugates of physically interacting cells in the tumour microenvironment.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Yaara Oren describes the development and use of the Watermelon system to simultaneously track the lineage, transcriptional profile and proliferative state of each cancer cell in a population, which enables the characterization of rare cycling persister cells.

This month, Nature Reviews Cancer launches Tools of the Trade articles, in which early career researchers can discuss the methods or techniques that they use to conduct their research.

Crist et al. set out to investigate what makes the colonization of skeletal muscle by disseminated tumour cells (DTCs) so rare and found that this niche enforces persistent oxidative stress on DTCs that cannot be overcome and therefore, restrains their proliferation.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Ana Luísa Correia describes the development and use of a tracker of dormant disseminated tumour cells to investigate the distribution and dynamics of dormant reservoirs within and across distant sites.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Christian Umkehrer describes the development and use of CaTCH, which enables therapy-naive cancer cell clones to be isolated and compared to their resistant counterparts.

Lv, Liu, Mo and colleagues demonstrate that in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cells, gasdermin E transports the transcription factor YBX1 to the nucleus, where it promotes the expression of mucins, thereby providing tumour cells with a barrier against digestive enzymes.