Science is the AAAS flagship and Nature's main rival. It is home to landmark cancer papers on mismatch repair and immunotherapy, cancer genome sequencing, liquid biopsy and the microbiome.
Science is a weekly multidisciplinary journal. Cancer landmarks include the Vogelstein group's tumour sequencing and CancerSEEK papers, the mismatch-repair deficiency and PD-1 tumour-agnostic work, gut microbiome and immunotherapy response studies, and the ecDNA and chromothripsis discoveries. Subscription with free access after 12 months and a green open-access policy; Science Translational Medicine and Science Immunology are sister titles.
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A blood test can find early, treatable cancers in people who feel well, including cancers for which no screening exists. It is not a replacement for mammography or colonoscopy but a possible addition. Larger randomised trials are needed to show benefit outweighs harm.
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The proof of principle for multi-cancer blood tests that include pancreas; the sensitivity figures come from known cancers, not from screening.
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This is the standard overview of checkpoint immunotherapy for clinicians and scientists, tying together the trial results and the biology of response and resistance that guide today's combination trials.
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This paper established a new regulatory paradigm: a drug approved for a molecular feature regardless of organ. It made MSI/MMR testing standard across advanced cancers and remains the clearest example of a biomarker that works across histologies. It also anchored the idea that mutation load, via neoantigens, is what makes tumours visible to T cells.
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It turned neuroendocrine transformation from a pathological curiosity into a mechanism with a genotype and a candidate intervention, and it is the reason EZH2 inhibitors are in prostate cancer trials at all.
A mechanism for the most feared form of treatment resistance in prostate cancer, and the reason combined TP53 and RB1 loss is worth knowing about before a man starts an androgen receptor drug rather than after his biopsy comes back neuroendocrine. Reversibility in the laboratory is also an argument that the switch is a target and not just a prognosis.
It supplies the chemistry behind the allele spectrum of lung cancer: the G to T transversion that the tobacco signature generates is why KRAS G12C dominates in lung and G12D dominates in bowel and pancreatic cancer.
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Carrying a cancer mutation is normal; most mutant clones never become cancer. This means blood or tissue tests that look for driver mutations alone will produce false positives, and that the question of what tips a mutant clone into cancer (tissue environment, further hits, immune surveillance) is as important as the mutation itself.
This paper turned a hypothesis into a biomarker: tumour mutational burden is now measured by commercial panels and underpins the tissue-agnostic approval of pembrolizumab for TMB-high tumours. It also explains why smokers' lung cancers, long the hardest to treat, respond better to immunotherapy than never-smokers' cancers.
There are not thousands of cancer genes, and any one patient's tumour is driven by only a few of them. That makes targeted sequencing panels sensible, but because most drivers are lost tumour suppressors, drugs exist for only a minority, which is why the same group turned to early detection.
Immunoediting is the conceptual backbone of modern immuno-oncology: it explains tumour heterogeneity, dormancy and late relapse, and why immunotherapy works by releasing pre-existing but suppressed immunity.
Together with the Wiegand study, this defined clear cell ovarian cancer as a chromatin remodelling-driven disease distinct from high-grade serous cancer.
It launched a decade of attempts to strip the stroma to let drugs in; the clinical trials that followed failed, and later mouse work showed the stroma also restrains the tumour.
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It set the frame that every later landscape paper filled in: pancreatic cancer is a disease of a few pathways broken by many different genes, so drugs must aim at pathways or their dependencies rather than one rare mutation.
It defined bypass resistance as a category and set the treatment rule that follows from it: keep blocking the original target and add an inhibitor of the bypass, which is the logic of every EGFR plus MET combination since.
This paper showed that the immune response to a cancer is part of its prognosis, not background noise, and it introduced the idea of the immune contexture that underlies both the Immunoscore and the biomarker work in immunotherapy.
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The most common single molecular event in prostate cancer, present in roughly half of tumours in most series, and the reason prostate cancer is classified by fusion status. It is also a standing reminder that finding the driver and drugging it are different problems: no ETS-directed therapy has reached the clinic.
Why a drug can look useless in one trial and transformative in another: the trials had different proportions of the patients the drug was for. It is the argument for genotyping before drawing conclusions from a response rate.
PDGFRA testing is part of standard GIST genotyping, and the imatinib resistance of D842V predicted here led to the development of avapritinib.
Selectivity does not have to be engineered. A wild virus can already prefer cancer cells if its replication depends on something the cancer has turned on. The difference between one injection in an immunodeficient mouse and a series in an immunocompetent one is the first clear signal in the literature that the host immune response both helps and hinders, which is still the central tension of the field.
KIT immunohistochemistry and mutation testing define GIST, and the exon 11 mutations described here are the ones most sensitive to imatinib.
This is the paper that made oncolytic viruses look like precision medicine: a named genetic lesion, a virus built to exploit it, a biomarker to select patients. None of that held. It is the field's most useful cautionary tale, because the drug went into large trials on a mechanism that turned out to be wrong, and the selectivity that does exist has never been reducible to one gene.
Every checkpoint inhibitor, from ipilimumab to pembrolizumab, rests on this idea: the immune system can already recognise cancer and just needs its brakes released. It changed the goal of immunotherapy from vaccinating against tumours to unleashing existing T cells.
It showed how mismatch repair failure selects for cancer: coding microsatellites in tumour suppressors are the targets, which is why TGFBR2, ACVR2A, RNF43 and B2M frameshifts are the signature of MSI-high bowel cancer.
The JAK-STAT pathway explains how interferon and interleukin signals act in immunity and cancer. Its discovery underlies ruxolitinib and other JAK inhibitors in myeloproliferative neoplasms, the role of STAT3 in tumour-promoting inflammation, and the interferon-gamma signalling that determines whether tumours respond to checkpoint inhibitors.
This paper is why TP53 status is reported in almost every tumour genome and why mutational signatures can point to causes. Its idea that mutation patterns record exposures grew into the mutational signature field, and TP53 mutation remains a marker of shorter survival and a drug target still being pursued.
This paper turned oncolytic virotherapy from a century of case reports into an engineering discipline. Every approved product descends from the same idea: delete a viral gene that a normal cell would have to supply and a cancer cell already supplies in excess. Talimogene laherparepvec and teserpaturev are both herpes viruses in this line.
This study confirmed HER2 as a prognostic marker and a therapeutic target, showed that immunohistochemistry could identify the patients, and extended the target to ovarian cancer. It set up the clinical development of trastuzumab and the HER2 testing that every breast cancer now receives.
Every HER2 test, every trastuzumab prescription and the whole HER2-positive breast cancer category trace back to this observation. It is the model for how a genomic marker of bad prognosis became a drug target and then the basis for one of the largest survival gains in solid tumour oncology.
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Invented BH3 profiling, the functional test behind venetoclax's success, before becoming NCI director.
Melanoma immunotherapy leader behind pembrolizumab's first trials and the science of why immunotherapy fails.
Discovered the TMPRSS2-ERG fusion in prostate cancer and built one of the first clinical sequencing programmes.
Blood cell molecular biologist who has led Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research since 2023, sharpening its focus on genomics, immunology and cancer.
Discovered how lenalidomide works, launching the field of molecular-glue degraders, and defined clonal haematopoiesis before leading Dana-Farber.
Bert Vogelstein is the most-cited scientist in cancer genetics: he mapped how colorectal cancer develops and founded the field of cancer genome sequencing and blood-based detection.
Bradley Bernstein mapped the chromatin landscapes that let cancer cells switch identities and resist drugs.
Co-developed imatinib's successor dasatinib and the prostate drug enzalutamide, and explained how cancers resist targeted drugs.
Co-discovered the synthetic lethality between PARP inhibition and BRCA loss that underlies PARP inhibitor therapy.
Linked HER2 amplification to aggressive breast cancer and drove trastuzumab and later palbociclib to approval.
First author of the studies that showed mismatch-repair-deficient tumours respond to PD-1 blockade regardless of origin.
Computational oncologist who built open tools for interpreting tumour genomes and predicting response.
With Emil Freireich he showed that combinations of drugs could cure childhood leukaemia, then extended the idea to Hodgkin lymphoma and to adjuvant treatment after surgery.
Systems biologist who has led the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a major funder of US biomedical and cancer research, since 2016.
Pioneer of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in human cells, the tool behind cancer dependency screens and edited cell therapies.
Biologist and long-time CNIO director of biotechnology programmes who became Acting Scientific Director of Spain's national cancer research centre in 2025.
Gérard Zalcman represents Cancer Institute AP-HP Nord, Université Paris Cité in the Organisation of European Cancer Institutes, which lists the centre among its members in France.
Without a doctorate, she and George Hitchings designed drugs to block DNA building blocks. Their 6-mercaptopurine of 1951 remains part of the cure for childhood leukaemia; she won the Nobel Prize in 1988.
Against the consensus that herpes was to blame, he proposed in 1976 that papillomaviruses cause cervical cancer and isolated HPV16 and HPV18 from tumours in 1983-84, making vaccination and HPV testing possible. Nobel Prize 2008.
Discovered that blocking CTLA-4 unleashes T cells against cancer, the work behind ipilimumab and the 2018 Nobel Prize.
Hematopathologist and cancer genomics pioneer who has led St. Jude Children's Research Hospital since 2014.
Led CheckMate 067, the trial whose ten-year data showed half of advanced melanoma patients on nivolumab plus ipilimumab are alive.
Surgeon-scientist who showed the gut microbiome shapes response to immunotherapy and led early neoadjuvant melanoma trials.
Tumour immunologist at Ludwig Lausanne who began a two-year term as President of the European Association for Cancer Research in June 2026.
Co-discovered APC, the gatekeeper gene of colorectal cancer, and co-led the first cancer genome sequences.
Immunologist who showed that the gut microbiome shapes responses to immunotherapy and chemotherapy.
Created the mathematical framework for extracting mutational signatures from cancer genomes and the COSMIC signature catalogue.
Co-led the work that made pembrolizumab the first tumour-agnostic cancer drug approval, for mismatch-repair-deficient tumours.
Markus G. Manz represents University Hospital Zurich / Comprehensive Cancer Center Zurich in the Organisation of European Cancer Institutes, which lists the centre among its members in Switzerland.
In 1990 she showed that a single gene on chromosome 17, BRCA1, causes inherited breast and ovarian cancer, when most of the field doubted such a gene existed. Genetic testing and risk-reducing care followed.
Lung cancer doctor who was the lead author of CheckMate 227, the trial that showed the immunotherapy pair nivolumab and ipilimumab helps people with advanced lung cancer live longer than chemotherapy alone.
Co-discovered EGFR mutations in lung cancer and linked Fusobacterium to colorectal cancer.
Physician-scientist and cancer metabolism expert who directs MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Oregon physician-scientist who showed that the KIT mutation type in a GIST predicts how well imatinib works, discovered PDGFRA mutations in the tumours without KIT mutations, and led NAVIGATOR, which established avapritinib for PDGFRA D842V disease.
Co-developed CancerSEEK, the blood test that showed multi-cancer early detection is possible, and ran the first prospective screening study of it.
Discovered the BCR-ABL kinase activity that imatinib blocks and now hunts for new prostate cancer targets.
Runs the platform that studies patients' tumours before and after immunotherapy to learn why checkpoint drugs work or fail.
Discovered the tumour-suppressor gene PTEN, one of the most frequently lost genes in cancer.
Proposed cancer immunoediting and showed neoantigens are the targets of checkpoint immunotherapy.
Directs Penn's cancer centre and pioneered CD40 agonist immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer.
Robert Martuza built the first genetically engineered virus designed to treat a cancer, a herpes virus crippled so that it could only replicate in dividing tumour cells.
Deciphered the mutational signatures written in cancer genomes and turned them into clinical tests like HRDetect.
Adoptive T-cell therapy pioneer whose defined-composition CAR-T work led to lisocabtagene maraleucel.
Father of cancer immunotherapy: first to cure patients with IL-2 and with their own tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes.
Cloned the T-cell receptor and co-discovered CTLA-4's brake function, foundations of modern immunotherapy.
Defined the T-cell-inflamed tumour, discovered STING's role in anti-tumour immunity and showed gut bacteria shape immunotherapy response.
Timothy Chan showed that tumour mutational burden predicts who benefits from checkpoint inhibitors.
Showed that gene expression could classify cancers, then built the Broad into the engine of cancer genomics.
Immunologist who showed T cells recognise cancer neoantigens, the basis for personalised vaccines and TCR therapies.
William Kaelin is the Nobel laureate whose work on VHL and HIF-2α led directly to belzutifan.
She found that PIK3CA is one of the most frequently mutated genes in human cancer, then spent the next twenty years working out which of a melanoma's mutations the immune system can actually see.
Immunologist who leads the Institut Pasteur in Paris, having taken up its presidency in January 2024 after a long career at the US National Institutes of Health.
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Shares Inactivation of the type II TGF-beta receptor in colon cancer cells with microsatellite instability, Detection and localization of surgically resectable cancers with a multi-analyte blood test, Core signaling pathways in human pancreatic cancers revealed by global genomic analyses, DETECT-A: a blood test plus PET-CT found treatable cancers in 10,000 women with no symptoms.
Shares Inactivation of the type II TGF-beta receptor in colon cancer cells with microsatellite instability, Detection and localization of surgically resectable cancers with a multi-analyte blood test, Core signaling pathways in human pancreatic cancers revealed by global genomic analyses, DETECT-A: a blood test plus PET-CT found treatable cancers in 10,000 women with no symptoms.
Shares Clonal hematopoiesis in human aging and disease, Somatic mutant clones colonize the human esophagus with age, Martincorena: normal sun-exposed skin is a patchwork of cancer-mutation clones.
Shares On the origin of cancer cells, Understanding the Warburg effect: the metabolic requirements of cell proliferation.