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This Focus issue highlights current research at the intersection of ageing and cancer, and explores how insights gained from this may lead to better cancer prevention strategies and diagnostics, enhanced therapeutic efficacy and improvements to both patient quality of life and outcomes.
While cancer treatments are essential for patient survival, they often induce premature ageing-related conditions in survivors. In this Comment, Demaria outlines how understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms of this is crucial for developing integrated strategies to improve long-term health outcomes in survivors.
Understanding the complex relationship between ageing and cancer is crucial for cancer risk prediction. In this Comment, LaBarge and Binder explore how tissue-specific ageing biomarkers can enhance cancer risk stratification and highlight the need for tailored approaches in assessing susceptibility across different tissues.
In this Tools of the Trade article, Kenta Ninomiya describes the development of ImAge, an imaging-based approach that captures age-related trajectories of chromatin and epigenetic marks in single nuclei for longitudinal analyses.
In a recent study, Salomó Coll et al. demonstrate that impaired ER-phagy in Kras-mutant pancreatic acinar cells leads to the accumulation of protein aggregates and disruption of acinar cell homeostasis, thereby cooperating with oncogenic KRAS to promote cellular transformation.
In this Review, Henry and DeGregori discuss the contributions of the various models and methods used to study the connection between ageing and cancer, highlighting the strengths and limitations of those models and technologies, as well as advocating for the wider adoption of age-appropriate models of cancer to improve our clinical translation of approaches to prevent and treat human cancers.
Ageing influences cancer risk through cellular and environmental changes, including the induction of cellular senescence. In this Review, Ye, Melam and Stewart highlight the role of senescent stromal cells in cancer and the therapeutic implications of this.
In this Perspective, Lazure and Gomes argue that metabolic changes that occur as a result of ageing may shape tumour initiation and progression and the development of metastatic disease.