Reviews & Analysis

This Review discusses our current understanding of adaptive and innate immune cell metabolism in the context of the tumour microenvironment, providing insight into the interaction of cancer cell metabolism and immune metabolism, as well as the potential for leveraging metabolic vulnerabilities to enhance the antitumour immune response.

This Review discusses the key role that natural killer (NK) cells play in driving an antitumour immune response throughout the progression of cancer from its initial development to its metastatic spread and eventual treatment, defined herein as the cancer–NK cell immunity cycle.

This Review discusses intra-prostatic inflammatory processes and how they are induced and perpetuated, thereby driving prostate cancer development and progression. By discussing external inflammatory cues in connection to cancer cell-intrinsic factors in prostate tumorigenesis, the authors provide insight into potential preventative and therapeutic strategies.

This Review presents the evidence for the role of risk factors in breast cancer incidence and their inclusion in risk estimation tools as a step towards precision prevention to specifically target those women at increased risk for appropriate risk-reducing interventions.

This Review discusses recent advances in cohesin biology in cancer, providing insights into the role of cohesin inactivation in cancer pathogenesis and opportunities for exploiting these findings for the clinical benefit of patients with cohesin-mutant cancers.

This Perspective proposes operational definitions to define the hallmarks of cancer cell dormancy and, based on the latest evidence pertaining to the role of the microenvironment in regulating dormancy, presents key stages in the life cycle of a dormant cancer cell that could be targeted.

This Perspective advocates the study of tumour predisposition syndromes as an opportunity to better identify gene–environment interactions that influence cancer risk. Understanding syndrome-associated molecular mechanisms may provide new and more effective ways to prevent exposure-associated cancers in the general population.

This Review outlines the ways in which leukaemic stem cells (LSCs) take advantage of normal haematopoietic stem cell properties to promote survival and expansion in myeloid leukaemogenesis. Opportunities for treatment of this disease by targeting LSC-specific mechanisms are also discussed.

This Perspective explores why TP53 is the most commonly mutated gene in cancer, discussing the evolutionary conservation of the p53 pathway in the context of tissue-specific functions and underlying reasons for the order of mutations which lead to p53-related cancer.

This Perspective discusses how executable computational models, integrating various data sets derived from preclinical models and cancer patients, can be used to represent the dynamic biological behaviours inherent in cancer. The article argues that these models might be used as patient avatars to improve personalized treatments.

This Review discusses oncoproteins known to cause both cancer and congenital disorders, and the biology of oncoproteins in both transformed and untransformed tissues, exploring the fundamentals of genetics, signalling and the pathogenesis that underlie oncoprotein duality.

After synthesis, all RNA molecules are subject to covalent modifications. This Review presents the evidence that RNA modification pathways are misregulated in cancer and suggests that they may be ideal targets for cancer therapy.

Peripheral T cell lymphomas (PTCLs) are a heterogeneous group of rare neoplasms. This Review outlines our current understanding of the genomic defects and host environment characteristics that promote PTCL development with the aim of improving molecular stratification and targeted therapy for PTCLs.

This Review outlines the recent advances in the creation of both combinatorial transgenic cancer models in zebrafish and zebrafish patient-derived xenograft models, and argues that these models have potential to be used as avatars for precision oncology.

This Perspective discusses the development of cachexia in the context of cancer progression, providing insight into how circulating factors contribute to this syndrome, and exploring how signals involved in metastasis can potentially amplify cachexia development.

This Review focuses on the role of tumour cell-autonomous signalling after radiotherapy. It describes how radiotherapy, through its immunomodulating effects, might be combined with immune checkpoint inhibitors and other immunotherapies and how DNA damage response inhibitors in combination with radiotherapy may be used to further augment this approach.

This Perspective outlines our current understanding of how the bone marrow niche contributes to both the initiation and the progression of haematological malignancies and suggests guidelines for the field which might help to overcome existing research challenges.

This Perspective discusses the theory of multi-task evolution in cancer, which can contribute to understanding tumour diversity. It introduces the concept of generalist and specialist tumours in the contexts of driver mutations and discusses the potential applications to interpret intratumour heterogeneity.

Recent single-cell RNA-sequencing studies have revealed a range of intratumoural T cell states, both within and between patients. This Review outlines the CD8⁺ T cell states that have been identified in human tumours and the potential roles they play in tumour control as well as how they are influenced by immune checkpoint blockade.

This Consensus Statement highlights the importance of cancer-associated fibroblasts in cancer biology and progression, and issues a call to action for all cancer researchers to standardize assays and report metadata in studies of cancer-associated fibroblasts to advance our understanding of this important cell type in the tumour microenvironment.