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Skin cancer can involve melanocytes, leading to melanoma, but there are other non-melanoma skin cancers. These include basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and, less commonly, Merkel cell carcinoma, Kaposis sarcoma and T-cell lymphoma of the skin.
Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases can promote or suppress cancer progression by regulating codon-dependent translation. A study now shows that valine aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (VARS) promotes therapeutic resistance of melanoma to MAPK pathway inhibitors by enhancing translation of valine-enriched genes, including the fatty acid oxidation gene HADH.
El-Hachem et al. show that MAPK therapy upregulates valine aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase and alters fatty acid oxidation by promoting translation of valine-enriched transcripts, providing a resistance mechanism that may be therapeutically targeted.
Treatment failure following chimaeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is common yet incompletely understood. In this study, the authors demonstrate that deletion of the mitochondrial negative regulator, MCJ, in CAR T cells promotes target cell killing ex vivo and augments their efficacy in an in vivo B cell leukaemia model.
Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases can promote or suppress cancer progression by regulating codon-dependent translation. A study now shows that valine aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (VARS) promotes therapeutic resistance of melanoma to MAPK pathway inhibitors by enhancing translation of valine-enriched genes, including the fatty acid oxidation gene HADH.
Leveraging the expertise of physicians to identify medically meaningful features in ‘counterfactual’ images produced via generative machine learning facilitates the auditing of the inference process of medical-image classifiers, as shown for dermatology images.
In this study, Bansaccal et al. analyse why, at some skin locations, oncogene-expressing cells rarely progress to cancer and found that a dense dermal collagen network prevents skin cancer formation.