Covering medical science and health stories for the past few years, I’ve seen important, heartening advances against cancer. In 2022 some of my favorite stories described exciting new areas of research, ranging from the roles that fungi may play in tumor biology to the burgeoning field of cancer diagnostics for our pets.

While most vaccines take between 10 to 15 years to develop, the most popular coronavirus vaccines began entering arms around the world in less than a year—due in part to decades of past work by scientists developing similar vaccines to treat cancer. Many of these inoculations rely on strands of messenger RNA, or mRNA, that prime immune cells to recognize and destroy invaders, be they viruses or tumor cells.