Department of Oncology, The Affliated Wuxi People's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi People's Hospital, Wuxi Medical Center, Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi, China.
Department of Oncology, The Affliated Wuxi People's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi People's Hospital, Wuxi Medical Center, Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi, China.
Int Immunopharmacol. 2024 Dec 25;143(Pt 2):113482. doi: 10.1016/j.intimp.2024.113482. Epub 2024 Oct 29.
Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs), which are the most frequent stromal cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME), play a key role in the metastasis of tumor cells. Generally speaking, CAFs in cooperation with tumor cells can secrete various cytokines, proteins, growth factors, and metabolites to promote angiogenesis, mediate immune escape of tumor cells, enhance endothelial-to-mesenchymal transition, stimulate extracellular matrix remodeling, and preserve tumor cell stemness. These activities of CAFs provide a favorable exogenous pathway for tumor progression and metastasis, and a microenvironment that allows rapid growth of tumor cells, which always lead to poor prognosis for patients. More importantly, it seems that targeting CAFs is also a potential precision therapeutic strategy in clinical practice. Hence, this review outlines the origin of CAFs, the relationship between CAFs and cancer metastasis, and targeting CAFs as a potential strategy for cancer patients, which could give some inspirations for cancer treatment in clinic.
癌症相关成纤维细胞（CAFs）是肿瘤微环境（TME）中最常见的基质细胞，在肿瘤细胞转移中起着关键作用。一般来说，CAFs 与肿瘤细胞合作可以分泌各种细胞因子、蛋白质、生长因子和代谢物，促进血管生成，介导肿瘤细胞的免疫逃逸，增强内皮到间充质转化，刺激细胞外基质重塑，并维持肿瘤细胞的干性。CAFs 的这些活动为肿瘤的进展和转移提供了有利的外部途径，并为肿瘤细胞的快速生长提供了微环境，这通常导致患者预后不良。更重要的是，似乎针对 CAFs 也是临床实践中一种有潜力的精准治疗策略。因此，本综述概述了 CAFs 的起源、CAFs 与癌症转移的关系，以及将 CAFs 作为癌症患者的潜在治疗策略，这可能为临床癌症治疗提供一些启示。
