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Remembrance of inflammations past

Chronic inflammation increases the risk of colon cancer. This inflammation drives epigenetic changes in the nucleus of stem cells that promote tumour formation.
By
  1. Chengxiang Qiu

    1. Chengxiang Qiu is in the Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA, and in the Department of Molecular and Systems Biology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.

  2. Jay Shendure

    1. Jay Shendure is in the Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA, and at the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, Seattle; the Institute of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, University of Washington; the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine, Seattle; the Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing, Seattle; and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Seattle.

A condition involving chronic inflammation of the colon, called ulcerative colitis, is associated with an increased risk of developing colorectal cancer1. Moreover, this risk correlates with the cumulative effect of inflammatory episodes rather than the extent of active inflammation at the time of diagnosis2. Writing in Nature, Nagaraja et al.3 reveal that chronic colonic inflammation results in changes (called epigenetic modifications) that poise stem cells to form tumours if cancer-promoting genetic alterations subsequently occur.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00639-0

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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