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Targeting of TAMs: can we be more clever than cancer cells?
With increasing incidence and geography, cancer is one of the leading causes of death, reduced quality of life and disability worldwide. Principal progress in the development of new anticancer therapies, in improving the efficiency of immunotherapeutic tools, and in the personification of conventional therapies needs to consider cancer-specific and patient-specific programming of innate immunity. Intratumoral TAMs and their precursors, resident macrophages and monocytes, are principal regulators of tumor progression and therapy resistance. Our review summarizes the accumulated evidence for the subpopulations of TAMs and their increasing number of biomarkers, indicating their predictive value for the clinical parameters of carcinogenesis and therapy resistance, with a focus on solid cancers of non-infectious etiology. We present the state-of-the-art knowledge about the tumor-supporting functions of TAMs at all stages of tumor progression and highlight biomarkers, recently identified by single-cell and spatial analytical methods, that discriminate between tumor-promoting and tumor-inhibiting TAMs, where both subtypes express a combination of prototype M1 and M2 genes. Our review focuses on novel mechanisms involved in the crosstalk among epigenetic, signaling, transcriptional and metabolic pathways in TAMs. Particular attention has been given to the recently identified link between cancer cell metabolism and the epigenetic programming of TAMs by histone lactylation, which can be responsible for the unlimited protumoral programming of TAMs. Finally, we explain how TAMs interfere with currently used anticancer therapeutics and summarize the most advanced data from clinical trials, which we divide into four categories: inhibition of TAM survival and differentiation, inhibition of monocyte/TAM recruitment into tumors, functional reprogramming of TAMs, and genetic enhancement of macrophages.
Enhancer reprogramming: critical roles in cancer and promising therapeutic strategies
Transcriptional dysregulation is a hallmark of cancer initiation and progression, driven by genetic and epigenetic alterations. Enhancer reprogramming has emerged as a pivotal driver of carcinogenesis, with cancer cells often relying on aberrant transcriptional programs. The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies has provided critical insights into enhancer reprogramming events and their role in malignancy. While targeting enhancers presents a promising therapeutic strategy, significant challenges remain. These include the off-target effects of enhancer-targeting technologies, the complexity and redundancy of enhancer networks, and the dynamic nature of enhancer reprogramming, which may contribute to therapeutic resistance. This review comprehensively encapsulates the structural attributes of enhancers, delineates the mechanisms underlying their dysregulation in malignant transformation, and evaluates the therapeutic opportunities and limitations associated with targeting enhancers in cancer.
Associations of mucinous differentiation and mucin expression with immune cell infiltration and prognosis in colorectal adenocarcinoma
The production of extracellular mucus and expression of mucins are commonly aberrant in colorectal cancer, yet their roles in tumour progression remain unclear.
Neuroinflammatory fluid biomarkers in patients with Alzheimer’s disease: a systematic literature review
Neuroinflammation is associated with both early and late stages of the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Fluid biomarkers are gaining significance in clinical practice for diagnosis in presymptomatic stages, monitoring, and disease prognosis. This systematic literature review (SLR) aimed to identify fluid biomarkers for neuroinflammation related to clinical stages across the AD continuum and examined long-term outcomes associated with changes in biomarkers.
3D genome landscape of primary and metastatic colorectal carcinoma reveals the regulatory mechanism of tumorigenic and metastatic gene expression
Colorectal carcinoma (CRC) is a deadly cancer with an aggressive nature, and how CRC tumor cells manage to translocate and proliferate in a new tissue environment remains not fully understood. Recently, higher-order chromatin structures and spatial genome organization are increasingly implicated in diseases including cancer, but in-depth studies of three-dimensional genome (3D genome) of metastatic cancer are currently lacking, preventing the understanding of the roles of genome organization during metastasis. Here we perform multi-omics profiling of matched normal colon, primary tumor, lymph node metastasis, liver metastasis and normal liver tissue from CRC patients using Hi-C, ATAC-seq and RNA-seq technologies. We find that widespread alteration of 3D chromatin structure is accompanied by dysregulation of genes including SPP1 during the tumorigenesis or metastasis of CRC. Remarkably, the hierarchy of topological associating domain (TAD) changes dynamically, which challenges the traditional view that the TAD structure between tumor and normal tissue is conservative. In addition, we define compartment stability score to measure large-scale alteration in metastatic tumors. To integrate multi-omics data and recognize candidate genes driving cancer metastasis, a pipeline is developed based on Hi-C, RNA-seq and ATAC-seq data. And three candidate genes ARL4C, FLNA, and RGCC are validated to be associated with CRC cell migration and invasion using in vitro knockout experiments. Overall, these data resources and results offer new insights into the involvement of 3D genome in cancer metastasis.
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