When your social media account starts spewing out nonsensical or threatening status updates, it’s safe to assume that it has been hacked and must be shut down.

The cells in our body also update their “status” by presenting to their environment small proteins that are constantly being produced inside the cell. Our immune system monitors these statuses and destroys cells that produce unusual proteins. A classic example of this is when a cell is infected by a virus and presents parts of the viral proteins on its surface, which allows the immune system to recognize them and destroy the cell.

In contrast, cancer cells often evade detection by displaying very few suspicious proteins that the immune system can identify and target. A new approach to cancer treatment, developed by researchers from Prof. Yardena Samuels’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science, increases the number of the immune system’s targets by disrupting protein production in cancerous cells.