In this Review, Mempel et al. use our understanding of the physiological response programmes of the immune system to the more commonplace challenges it encounters as a framework to interpret observations of chemokine function in tumours. When viewed in this way, the design of more effective therapeutic interventions leveraging the chemokine system to recalibrate response patterns to cancer might be possible.

Numerous immunomodulatory antibodies for cancer treatment have been developed following the discovery of negative regulators of antitumour immunity such as programmed cell death protein 1 (PD1) and cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 (CTLA4). The efficacy of these antibodies is determined not only by their ability to block or engage their target but also by their interactions with Fcγ receptors (FcγRs). This Review outlines our current knowledge of these interactions and discusses how we can use this knowledge to generate more effective cancer immunotherapies in the future.

This month, Nature Reviews Cancer launches Roadmap articles, in which we ask authors to provide a sense of direction to a field to encourage new lines of thinking and experimentation, as well as opportunities for collaboration.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Erin Brown describes the development of CytoSPACE, a computational tool that aligns single-cell transcriptomes and spatial transcriptomic data, and highlights its use in identifying spatially resolved cell states in the tumour microenvironment.

To establish microbiome-based screening for colorectal cancer, a study published in Nature Medicine tackled two key challenges: utilizing quantitative microbiome profiling and identifying covariates that might obscure the microbiota–colorectal cancer interactions.

Monteran et al. identified key interactions between granulocytes and T cells that promote an immunosuppressive bone microenvironment, enabling breast cancer metastasis.

Parreno et al. provide evidence for epigenetically initiated cancers in Drosophila and show that cancer develops after transient loss of Polycomb group proteins in the absence of recurrent mutations.

In this Journal Club, Lim and Jeon discuss a recent study demonstrating the utility of noninvasive genomic profiling for subtyping Hodgkin lymphomas.