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A death sentence for ‘sloppy’ cancers
Lorenzo Valcanover is in the Division of Oncogenomics, Oncode Institute, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam 1066 CX, the Netherlands.
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Reuven Agami is in the Division of Oncogenomics, Oncode Institute, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam 1066 CX, the Netherlands, and the Department of Genetics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
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Identifying cellular properties that distinguish a cancer from healthy tissue is a crucial step for developing efficient treatments. One such characteristic is the ‘sloppy’ way in which some cancer cells implement translation — the process by which proteins are made from messenger RNA by protein complexes called ribosomes. This process can go awry. Writing in Nature, Wang et al.1 reveal a cancer-specific mechanism by which translation loses its normal ‘track’ of how it reads an mRNA sequence to encode the expected amino acids, resulting in a phenomenon called frameshifting. This generates proteins that have a distinct sequence of amino acids that are not usually made, and the authors show that this abnormality might be exploited for therapeutic purposes.
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Wang, Q. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11200-4 (2026).
Champagne, J. et al. Mol. Cell 81, 4709–4721 (2021).