The 4th of February was “World Cancer Day”. The day was established in 2000 by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), a global organization consisting of more than 1100 member organizations, in order “to raise awareness about cancer, encourage its prevention, and mobilise action to address the global cancer epidemic”. Twenty-six years later, although the number of new cancer cases continues to rise, research advances have led to earlier diagnosis, more effective treatments, and steadily improving survival rates. These achievements make coordinated, global action more important and more hopeful than ever.

In this day we celebrate the human spirit that drives the hundreds of thousands of research scientists and clinicians in academia, research institutes, industry and hospitals, plan for the next experiment and never give up; as well as everyone supporting them to keep doing so. We also honour the strength and courage of the millions of people living with cancer around the world, many with limited access to treatment. And we remember also those who were not fortunate enough to benefit from one of the life-saving therapeutic breakthroughs of today.

In BMC Biology we are committed to advance basic and translational cancer research and, working together with our chosen Reviewers and Associate Editors we strive to publish rigorous and important work that brings new insights to the field of Cancer Biology and brings us one little step closer to understanding mechanisms of disease, diagnosis, prevention and therapy, one article at a time.

We commemorate this day by highlighting some of the research and Review articles published in BMC Biology the last couple of years. We would like to thank the authors of the articles below for entrusting us with their studies.

Highlights from recent BMC Biology publications

Review articles:

• The neglected burden of chronic hypoxia on the resistance of glioblastoma multiforme to first-line therapies —Jolie Bou-Gharios, Georges Noël & Hélène Burckel

• Harnessing ferroptosis for precision oncology: challenges and prospects — Roberto Fernández-Acosta, Iuliana Vintea, Ine Koeken, Behrouz Hassannia & Tom Vanden Berghe

• Iron metabolism and ferroptosis in human health and disease — Meijuan Zhong, Yuandi Wang, Junxia Min & Fudi Wang.

Research articles

Cellular Stress, Autophagy and Tumor Adaptation

• Migrasomal autophagosomes relieve endoplasmic reticulum stress in glioblastoma cells— Seon Yong Lee, Sang-Hun Choi, Yoonji Kim, Hee-Sung Ahn, Young-Gyu Ko, Kyunggon Kim, Sung Wook Chi & Hyunggee Kim

AI and Genomics: Precision Diagnostics from Routine Data

• Prediction of homologous recombination deficiency from routine histology with attention‑based multiple instance learning in nine different tumor types — Chiara Maria Lavinia Loeffler, Omar S. M. El Nahhas, Hannah Sophie Muti, Zunamys I. Carrero, Tobias Seibel, Marko van Treeck, Didem Cifci, Marco Gustav, Kevin Bretz, Nadine T. Gaisa, Kjong-Van Lehmann, Alexandra Leary, Pier Selenica, Jorge S. Reis-Filho, Nadina Ortiz-Bruechle & Jakob Nikolas Kather

• Single‑cell RNA sequencing integrated with bulk RNA sequencing analysis identifies a tumor immune microenvironment‑related lncRNA signature in lung adenocarcinoma — Yuqing Ren, Ruhao Wu, Chunwei Li, Long Liu, Lifeng Li, Siyuan Weng, Hui Xu, Zhe Xing, Yuyuan Zhang, Libo Wang, Zaoqu Liu & Xinwei Han

Tumor Mechanobiology

• High matrix stiffness accelerates migration of hepatocellular carcinoma cells through the integrin β1‑Plectin‑F‑actin axis — Zhihui Wang, Wenbin Wang, Qing Luo & Guanbin Song

Epigenetics and Genome Dynamics in Cancer progression

• Mapping chromatin remodelling in glioblastoma identifies epigenetic regulation of key molecular pathways and novel druggable targets. — Claire Vinel, James Boot, Weiwei Jin, Nicola Pomella, Alexandra Hadaway, Charles Mein, Nicolae Radu Zabet & Silvia Marino

• Colorectal cancer progression to metastasis is associated with dynamic genome‑wide biphasic 5‑hydroxymethylcytosine accumulation — Ben Murcott, Floris Honig, Dominic Oliver Halliwell, Yuan Tian, James Lawrence Robson, Piotr Manasterski, Jennifer Pinnell, Thérèse Dix-Peek, Santiago Uribe-Lewis, Ashraf E. K. Ibrahim, Julia Sero, David Gurevich, Nikolas Nikolaou & Adele Murrell

Therapy Resistance and Cell cycle regulation

• ARv7 promotes the escape of prostate cancer cells from androgen deprivation therapy‑induced senescence by mediating the SKP2/p27 axis — Dian Zhuang, Jinsong Kang, Haoge Luo, Yu Tian, Xiaoping Liu & Chen Shao

Thematic Collections in BMC Biology: Calls for Papers

As part of our ongoing commitment to host cutting edge research articles in the Cancer field, we have launched Collections on the following topics:

• Cancer Metabolism — Newly launched and currently open for submissions. Researchers may contact lead editor, Vitor Sousa, or submit via the journal portal.

• Stem Cells and Cancer — Read the published articles here. Officially closed for submissions but remains open for exceptional manuscripts until March 2026 (contact lead editor, Anna Melidoni for inquiries).

• Ferroptosis - Closed for submissions, read the published articles here.

We also currently plan for our upcoming call for papers on: “Mechanisms of Drug Resistance”, with a special focus on cancer-specific drug resistance mechanisms that limit therapeutic efficacy, including those arising from tumour heterogeneity, lineage plasticity, phenotypic switching, and tumour–immune interactions altered by immune evasion. Please contact lead editor, Anna Melidoni for inquiries, or if you’d like to be considered as a Guest Editor.

Coming soon will also be a Collection on the biology of Epigenetic Therapies, including those with potential use for cancer treatment. Please contact Chief Editor, Graham Bell for inquiries, or if you’d like to be considered as a Guest Editor.