Featured Discoveries
Nguyen LV et al. Cell Reports 2025
Discovery: One Rogue Cell Can Rebuild an Entire Tumour — And We Caught It in the Act
Why it matters: Out of thousands of cancer cells, only a rare few can regrow a whole tumour — and this study is the first to watch, at single-cell resolution, exactly how they do it.
Summary: Not all cancer cells are equal. Within a tumour, most cells are dead ends — they don’t survive, spread, or drive the disease forward. But a vanishingly small number have the ability to regenerate an entire tumour on their own. Our team used a genetic “barcoding” technique — tagging individual cancer cells with a unique, trackable DNA signature — to follow the fate of individual breast cancer cells. This let us identify, for the first time at this scale, which rare cells actually go on to rebuild a tumour, and use single-cell sequencing to watch what genetic programs switch on as they do it. We found that these “propagating” cells aren’t fixed in one state — they shift and adapt as they regrow the tumour, faithfully recreating the full diversity of cell types found in the original cancer. In aggressive basal-type breast cancers in particular, we found these tumour-rebuilding cells split into two distinct populations with different survival strategies. Understanding which cells have this dangerous rebuilding capacity — and how they achieve it — is a critical step toward designing therapies that target the source of relapse, not just the bulk of a shrinking tumour.
Impact: This resource of 20,000+ tracked cancer clones is now being used to hunt for ways to specifically eliminate the rare cells that drive relapse. Your support helps fund the next phase of this work.
Kronheim S et al. bioRxiv 2026
Discovery: The Tumour’s Secret Escape Plan: How Cancer Cells Hide, Then Take Over, After Chemo
Why it matters: A tumour can look like it’s shrinking under chemotherapy — and still be quietly rebuilding itself from a handful of hidden, drug-resistant cells. This study caught that switch happening in real time, at the level of individual cells.
Summary: We tend to think of chemotherapy response in simple terms: the tumour shrinks, or it doesn’t. This study shows that’s not the whole story. Using the same genetic “barcoding” approach from our earlier work, we tracked over 3,000 individual cancer cell lineages through chemotherapy treatment in breast cancer models. The result was striking: even in tumours that kept growing despite treatment — which looked, from the outside, like chemotherapy simply wasn’t working — the cellular makeup underneath had been completely overhauled. A single cell type that dominated the tumour before treatment was nearly wiped out, and replaced by dozens to hundreds of previously rare, drug-tolerant cells that surged to take its place. In other words, the chemo was doing something — just not what a tumour-size measurement could show. We also identified specific genes that switch on in the cells that survive treatment, marking a “hibernation-like” survival state rather than a permanent genetic change. This means resistance isn’t always about a cancer cell mutating — sometimes it’s about a rare cell changing its behavior to ride out the storm, then re-emerging once the treatment ends.
Impact: These findings point directly at new drug targets that could be paired with chemotherapy to stop resistant cells from surviving. Your support helps move this from a laboratory finding toward a testable treatment strategy.
Shin HJ et al. STAR Protocols 2025
Discovery: The Blueprint Behind the Discovery: How We Track a Single Cancer Cell’s Family Tree
Why it matters: A powerful discovery is only as useful as the tools that made it possible. This companion paper shares, in full technical detail, exactly how our team built and validated the DNA “barcoding” system behind our tumour-tracking discovery — so labs anywhere in the world can use it too.
Summary: Behind every big discovery is a lot of careful toolmaking. To track individual cancer cells and their descendants, our team needed a way to give each cell a permanent, unique genetic “name tag” — one that would pass down to every descendant of that cell and could later be read out by DNA sequencing. In this paper, we share exactly how we built this system: designing a DNA barcode with millions of possible combinations, inserting it into cells using a modified virus, and precisely counting how many cells trace back to each original tagged cell. We also solved a common challenge in this field: how to fairly compare cell counts between different experiments and sequencing runs. We did this by adding known quantities of specially designed control barcodes — a reliable ruler that turns raw sequencing data into real, absolute cell counts. Sharing this level of process detail means other researchers studying cancer, blood, and developmental biology can adopt and build on our approach, multiplying the reach of the work well beyond our own lab.
Impact: Rigorous, reproducible tools like this one are one of the most valuable — and least visible — products of a research lab. They multiply the impact of a single discovery across the entire research community. Supporting our lab supports not just our own findings, but the tools other labs worldwide are now building on.
