cancer research

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American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)

Read inspiring stories from survivors benefiting from research-driven advances against cancer, like head and neck cancer survivor Bill McCone of Pennsylvania. April is Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Month.

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Cancer is not a single disease, but rather a collection of diseases all characterized by the uncontrolled proliferation of cells.

Four in 10 cancers diagnosed in the United States each year are related to potentially preventable causes. Learn about cancer risk reduction and prevention.

April is Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. Last year an estimated 9,910 people in the U.S. were diagnosed with testicular cancer. Get more information about this type of cancer.

Get updates on the AACR Annual Meeting 2024 recently held in San Diego on the AACR Blog.

The Week in Cancer News: A roundup of significant cancer research news from the past week, selected by the staff of Cancer Today magazine.

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The AACR Cancer Progress Report 2023 provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research-driven advances against the collection of devastating diseases called cancer.

The AACR and its more than 58,000 members worldwide are advancing a scientifically bold agenda against the collection of diseases we call cancer.

A new wave of research-driven discoveries and technological innovations are delivering – and will propel additional – transformative advances to save more lives from cancer..

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percent decrease of the overall age-adjusted cancer death rate in the U.S. from 1991 to 2020

therapeutics were approved for new or expanded uses by the FDA from Aug. 1, 2022, to July 31, 2023

million cancer survivors in the U.S. are living with, through, and beyond their disease thanks to research

cancer diagnoses in the United States are associated with preventable risk factors

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A silhouette of a human body showing Fna C2 bacterium in the mouth and a colon tumor.

The bacteria subtype fueled precancerous growths in mice and was often found in human tumor samples.

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In a trial, the tool accurately predicted how individual cells would respond to single drugs and drug combinations.

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MRI scans and surgery appear to lower the risk of dying from breast and ovarian cancer.

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NCI Fiscal Year 2025 Professional Judgment Budget Proposal

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Clinical trial researching medication therapy for IDH2-mutated nasal cavity or skull base tumors

Cellular processing reverses molecule’s effect on anticancer immunity

Clinical trial researching post-treatment care for prostate cancer

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Black voices in cancer research and oncology

Kilan C. Ashad-Bishop, Onyinye D. Balogun, Runcie C.W. Chidebe, Leah M. Cook & Christina Towers

Cancers make their own luck: theories of cancer origins

Understanding how cell intrinsic and extrinsic factors combine to initiate transformation holds promise for the development of strategies to prevent, detect and treat cancer early. In this Review, Jassim et al. outline the various theories that have currently been proposed for cancer origins, and the determinants of cancer risk upon which they are based.

Amir Jassim
Eric P. Rahrmann
Richard J. Gilbertson

Mechanisms driving the immunoregulatory function of cancer cells

This Review outlines how the profound intertumoural heterogeneity in immune landscapes of tumours is shaped by cancer cell-intrinsic alterations and highlights how the crosstalk between these two continuously evolving systems not only challenges therapy success of immunomodulatory drugs but also provides the basis for new therapeutic strategies to overcome immune evasion.

Antoinette van Weverwijk
Karin E. de Visser

Current issue

Discovering new drivers of cancer aneuploidy.

Juliann Shih

Inferring cancer metabolism from gene-expression data

Vakul Mohanty

B-ring sterols to the rescue

Daniela Senft
Kilan C. Ashad-Bishop
Onyinye D. Balogun
Christina Towers

Protein lipidation in cancer: mechanisms, dysregulation and emerging drug targets

Edward W. Tate

Extrachromosomal DNA in cancer

Xiaowei Yan
Paul Mischel
Howard Chang

Announcements

two people representing an early-career researcher and their mentor

Early-career researcher peer-review initiative

Nature Reviews Cancer is committed to facilitating training in peer review and to ensuring that everyone involved in our peer-review process is recognised. We have therefore joined an initiative to allow and encourage established referees to involve one early-career researcher in our peer-review process.

"crab" symbol formed from individual cancer cells

Milestones in Cancer

These Milestones celebrate two decades of breakthroughs in basic, translational and clinical research which have revolutionized our understanding and management of cancer.

Latest Reviews & Analysis

Combinatorial strategies to target RAS-driven cancers

In this Review, Cichowski and colleagues provide an overview of combinatorial strategies designed to treat RAS-driven cancers that are based on four concepts that include vertical pathway inhibition, co-targeting RAS and adaptive survival pathways, co-targeting downstream or converging pathways and capitalizing on other cancer-associated vulnerabilities.

Naiara Perurena
Karen Cichowski

Lymphatic vessels in the age of cancer immunotherapy

Tumour-associated lymphatic growth and remodelling were once viewed as a passive means by which cancer cells could regionally spread to lymph nodes. However, recent data point to an active and contrasting role for lymphatic vessels and their transport in antitumour immune surveillance. In this Review, Karakousi et al. provide a working framework to define this role for the lymphatic system in tumour progression and present avenues for its therapeutic manipulation to improve cancer immunotherapy.

Triantafyllia Karakousi
Tenny Mudianto
Amanda W. Lund

Hallmarks of sex bias in immuno-oncology: mechanisms and therapeutic implications

Sex differences impact various non-reproductive organ cancers, often leading to higher cancer incidence and poorer outcomes in male individuals. In this Perspective article, Xiao, Lee et al. outline the biological factors contributing to sex bias in immuno-oncology, emphasizing the need for future research to offer a fuller understanding of sex disparities in cancer.

Immunogenic cell death in cancer: targeting necroptosis to induce antitumour immunity

In this Review, Meier et al. discuss the molecular mechanisms of necroptosis, delineate how this form of immunogenic cell death activates antitumour immune responses and explore the opportunities and limitations of targeting necroptosis for anticancer therapy.

Pascal Meier
Arnaud J. Legrand

This Review provides an overview of the complexity and significance of protein lipidation in cancer, outlines how targeting protein lipidation pathways offer promising avenues for developing cancer treatments, and discusses the current state of drugs targeting these pathways.

Fungi in cancer

Jessica Galloway-Peña
Iliyan D. Iliev
Florencia McAllister

Beyond genetics: driving cancer with the tumour microenvironment behind the wheel

Shaopeng Yuan
Jorge Almagro
Elaine Fuchs

News & Comment

Guardrails for the use of generalist AI in cancer care

Generalist medical artificial intelligence (GMAI) models are gaining momentum in their applications for cancer treatment. In this Comment, Gilbert and Kather advocate for novel regulation of GMAI approaches to ensure patient safety and adequate physician support.

Stephen Gilbert
Jakob Nikolas Kather

Programming immune escape

In a recent study published in Nature , Goto et al. explore mechanisms of immune evasion in early colorectal cancers and adenomas and identify SOX17 to be crucial for immune escape through suppression of interferon-γ signalling.

NET-working under stress

In this recent study, He et al. establish that chronic stress promotes metastasis through stress-induced formation of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs).

Gabrielle Brewer

Judith Campisi (1948–2024)

Pierre-Yves Desprez
Pankaj Kapahi

Routes to second cancers

Sánchez-Guixé et al. investigated the possible routes to second malignancies in survivors of paediatric cancer by studying four such clinical cases.

Revealing genomic secrets of archival FFPE samples

In this Tools of the Trade article, Kaile Wang describes the development and use of Arc-well, a high-throughput single-cell DNA sequencing method tailored to analyse archival formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) materials.