This rare disease day, Joanne Duffy looks at some of the cutting-edge research taking place at the ICR.

Through images and video, we explain new research that shows cancer cells use a mutant gene to coerce neighbouring healthy tissue into helping with the disease’s growth and spread.

Pathologists have tended to take a fairly straightforward approach to understanding tumours – by simply cutting them into slices and examining them under the microscope. To some extent, they have succeeded in predicting how tumours might behave based on how they looked.