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In this Tools of the Trade article, Zuzana Tatarova describes the development of MIMA, an integrated analytical platform providing the quantitative information on tumour microenvironment drug responses required for effective treatment design.
To establish microbiome-based screening for colorectal cancer, a study published in Nature Medicine tackled two key challenges: utilizing quantitative microbiome profiling and identifying covariates that might obscure the microbiota–colorectal cancer interactions.
Monteran et al. identified key interactions between granulocytes and T cells that promote an immunosuppressive bone microenvironment, enabling breast cancer metastasis.
Kong et al. have now shown that Knudson’s two-hit hypothesis can be circumvented through the actions of the glycolytic metabolite methylglyoxal, which transiently inactivates the tumour-suppressive functions of BRCA2 leading to episodic mutagenesis and cancer genome evolution.
Parreno et al. provide evidence for epigenetically initiated cancers in Drosophila and show that cancer develops after transient loss of Polycomb group proteins in the absence of recurrent mutations.
In this Journal Club, Oh and Kim discuss a study demonstrating the mechanisms underlying histological transformation of lung adenocarcinoma to neuroendocrine small-cell lung cancer.
Metastasis to the leptomeninges causes substantial neurological morbidity and mortality. Owing to the lack of mechanistic studies in this area, patients still face a bleak clinical prognosis. In this Review, Remsik and Boire provide a biology-focused overview of recent developments enabled by preclinical models and omics analyses and outline the need for further mechanistic research on leptomeningeal metastasis.
Although there has been increasing interest in developing models that mimic the tumour microenvironment (TME), these models often fail to replicate the complex 3D fibre architectures observed in tumours. Here, Ashworth and Cox address this, discuss the current design and fabrication challenges, and outline state-of-the-art biomaterial technologies useful for recreating tissue-specific 3D architectures in vitro.
The tumour immune microenvironment greatly affects responses to immune checkpoint therapies. In this Perspective, Zemek et al. explore the dynamic changes in response to both immunotherapy and conventional treatment and advocate for strategic combination therapies over time to enhance antitumour immune responses.
In this Perspective, Holder et al. discuss the limitations of current predictive biomarkers of response to immune checkpoint inhibitors and the need to further explore static, dynamic and patient-specific biomarkers using novel tools, such as machine learning and consortia-level initiatives.
