Villain Turned Hero

At the end of the film, it transpires the villain was trying to help all along, the true culprit lurking elsewhere. Such is the twist in the study of the protein HIF2α, once thought to be a driver of the childhood nerve cell cancer neuroblastoma, but now revealed to be a tumour suppressor. A research team found that high levels of HIF2α sharply reduce the cancer-driving protein MYCN common to many aggressive neuroblastomas. With HIF2α increased, MYCN was rapidly destroyed, cancer cells stopped dividing, tumours grew more slowly in mice, and cells developed into more mature, stable cell types (pictured, neuroblastoma cells with raised HIF2α, red, and a protein associated with mature neurons, green). Patient data also show that high HIF2α is linked to low-risk tumours and better survival, reinforcing the finding that HIF2α is a force for good in childhood cancers, and revealing a new route to potential intervention.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Juan Yuan & Subhamita Maitra, and colleagues
• Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), November 2025