Targeting Tumors

Meet some of the people featured in the April 2017 issue of The Scientist.

Cancer can be as evasive and slippery as a spitball, but new immunotherapies are starting to connect.

Eugene Garfield, the cancer moonshot, employee genetic testing, and more

Selected Images of the Day from the-scientist.com

Human visitors to camera traps display, well, human behavior.

Overcooked potatoes and burnt toast contain acrylamide, a potential carcinogen that researchers have struggled to reliably link to human cancers.

A plant breeder succeeds in growing a huge maize plant thanks to a known mutation and a few environmental tricks.

Despite an overall decrease in the number of US cancer deaths, some cancer types are on the rise, and disparities remain between genders and ethnicities.

Measuring PD-L1 levels was a great start. Now we need to quantify more protein biomarkers, assess the tumor mutational landscape, and examine immune cell signatures, too.

Researchers find diverse ways that the molecules can regulate cancer’s spread.

New monoclonal antibodies kill both cancer-promoting immunosuppressive cells and tumor cells in culture.

Through similar mechanisms, amino acid depletion in culture and cytokine activity in the tumor microenvironment prompt cancer cells to metastasize.

Mice engineered to overproduce the organelles involved in cell division spontaneously develop malignancies.

While studying the progression of healthy cells into cancerous ones, researchers discover a way to engraft human blood cells into animals.

Since first proposing that a cell’s function and biology depend on its surroundings, Mina Bissell continues to probe the role of the extracellular matrix.

At the University of California, Santa Cruz, the researcher combs the cancer genome, looking for weaknesses.

Using biocompatible polymers to carry cancer immune therapies directly to the tumor

Analyzing single cell sequences to decipher the evolution of a tumor

Following a spate of patient deaths in clinical trials testing modified T cells for the treatment of cancer, researchers work to reduce the treatment’s toxicity without sacrificing efficacy.

The new administration has not yet made its intentions clear.

In the middle of the 20th century, the National Cancer Institute began testing plant extracts for chemotherapeutic potential—helping to discover some drugs still in use today.