Cell
Cell is the leading molecular and cell biology journal. It published the Hallmarks of Cancer and much of the mechanistic biology behind today's cancer drugs.
Cell appears every two weeks. Hanahan and Weinberg's Hallmarks of Cancer (2000, 2011) appeared here, as did many TCGA Pan-Cancer Atlas papers, single-cell tumour microenvironment atlases, CRISPR screening resources and the mechanistic work on oncogene signalling. Elsevier hybrid model; STAR Methods and data-availability requirements are strict.
Cancers are defined as much by the tissue they come from as by the mutations they carry, which is why the same drug can work in one organ and fail in another with the same mutation. TCGA is the shared public dataset behind most modern biomarkers and target discovery.
DepMap is the lookup table drug hunters use to ask: which cancers would die if we blocked this gene, and how would we recognise them? It generated targets such as WRN and PRMT5-MTAP now in clinical trials, and it is public.
The hallmarks are the mental map most oncologists and researchers use to think about what cancer is and where drugs act. A newcomer can understand nearly every therapy as an attack on one hallmark: kinase inhibitors on proliferative signalling, checkpoint blockade on immune evasion, anti-VEGF drugs on angiogenesis.
Discovered the TMPRSS2-ERG fusion in prostate cancer and built one of the first clinical sequencing programmes.
Built the pancreatic cancer organoid models now used to test drugs against a patient's own tumour.
Co-author of the Fearon-Vogelstein model of how colorectal cancer develops step by step.
Francisca Vazquez leads DepMap, the public map of which genes each cancer cell line cannot live without.
MD Anderson's chief scientist, a cell-cycle biologist who ran drug discovery in industry before leading the centre's research.
Isolated the first blood stem cells and discovered the 'don't eat me' signal CD47 on cancer cells.
Discovered that blocking CTLA-4 unleashes T cells against cancer, the work behind ipilimumab and the 2018 Nobel Prize.
Li Ding is the computational leader of TCGA and CPTAC analyses linking genomes to proteins across cancers.
Mapped how macrophages and dendritic cells in tumours suppress immunity, opening new immunotherapy targets.
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.
Immunologist who built Canada's TIL therapy programme and defined T-cell tolerance mechanisms.
Showed how smoking-related lung cancers carry ten times the mutations of never-smokers' tumours.
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