Immune cells within the tumor microenvironment: biological functions and roles in cancer immunotherapy.

By X. Lei, Y. Lei, Jin-Ke Li, Weixing Du, Rugui Li, Jing Yang, Jian Li, Fang Li, Huabing Tan. Cancer Letters, 2019

1,208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The immune cells within the tumor microenvironment (TME) play important roles in tumorigenesis. It has been known that these tumor associated immune cells may possess tumor-antagonizing or tumor-promoting functions. Although the tumor-antagonizing immune cells within TME tend to target and kill the cancer cells in the early stage of tumorigenesis, the cancer cells seems to eventually escape from immune surveillance and even inhibit the cytotoxic function of tumor-antagonizing immune cells through a variety of mechanisms. The immune evasion capability, as a new hallmark of cancer, accidently provides opportunities for new strategies of cancer therapy, namely harnessing the immune cells to battle the cancer cells. Recently, the administrations of immune checkpoint modulators (represented by anti-CTLA4 and anti-PD antibodies) and adoptive immune cells (represented by CAR-T) have exhibited unexpected antitumor effect in multiple types of cancer, bringing a new era for cancer therapy. Here, we review the biological functions of immune cells within TME and their roles in cancer immunotherapy, and discuss the perspectives of the basic studies for improving the effectiveness of the clinical use.

Subfields: Immunology, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/595427d6f52bd6395bf3024370bc7ca665044d85

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. Qingcai Meng
2. Xianjun Yu
3. Jin Xu
4. Chen Liang
5. Qingxiang Zeng
6. Junjiang Liu
7. Jin Yang
8. J. Mu

Citations in the corpus

• Signaling pathways in cancer-associated fibroblasts and targeted therapy for cancer (2021, background): “immunogenicity.(322,323) Immunotherapies, harnessing the dual roles of the immune system in battling cancer, have emerged as new pillars within oncotherapy.”
• Crosstalk between cancer-associated fibroblasts and immune cells in the tumor microenvironment: new findings and future perspectives (2021, background): “Therefore, a thorough exploration of the crosstalk between CAFs and the TIME is required in the future to enable us to identify the basis of the impaired immune response induced by CAFs and might identify an essential method to restimulate the antitumor response which is distinct from strategies tha”