Viral mimicry escape as a necessary feature of malignant transformation

Cancer cells accumulate their own nucleic acids inside the cell, which the immune system reads as viral material and uses as a trigger to attack the tumour. A review in Nature Reviews Cancer argues that silencing this alarm — termed viral mimicry escape — is a necessary step in cancer formation, shared across many tumour types. Hence the therapeutic direction: epigenetic drugs that restore the alarm could expose the tumour to immune attack again. This is a review article, without clinical results of its own.