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Cancer Microenvironment

Section edited by Davide Bedognetti and Jessica Roelands

© © nopparit / Getty Images / iStock

The Cancer microenvironment section publishes research on the cellular and molecular components of the cancer microenvironment, with a particular focus on translational research that has important implications for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human neoplasms.

Submissions that relate to the characterisation of the molecular profile and regulation of cancers at different tumour stages are especially welcome, as are those which identify specific cancer microenvironments that predict tumour incidence, response to therapy and outcome. Laboratory studies of new drugs and biological agents that target cancer microenvironments will also be considered.

Featured articles


microRNA-1271 impedes the development of prostate cancer by downregulating PES1 and upregulating ERβ

Research | Zhenming Jiang et al


Tumor microenvironment differences between primary tumor and brain metastases

Review | Bernardo Cacho-Díaz et al


Identification of key genes controlling breast cancer stem cell characteristics via stemness indices analysis

Research | Jianying Pei et al

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  1. The outcomes of immune checkpoint inhibitors in cancer patients with liver metastases are poor, which may be related to a different tumor microenvironment in liver metastases from primary tumors. This study wa...

    Authors: Xiao-Li Wei, Xuan Luo, Hui Sheng, Yun Wang, Dong-Liang Chen, Jia-Ning Li, Feng-Hua Wang and Rui-Hua Xu
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:475
  2. The solid tumor microenvironment possesses a hypoxic condition, which promotes aggressiveness and resistance to therapies. Hypoxic tumor cells undergo broadly metabolic and molecular adaptations and communicat...

    Authors: Reza Jafari, Reza Rahbarghazi, Mahdi Ahmadi, Mehdi Hassanpour and Jafar Rezaie
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:474
  3. Heparanase is the only mammalian enzyme that cleaves heparan sulphate, an important component of the extracellular matrix. This leads to the remodelling of the extracellular matrix, whilst liberating growth fa...

    Authors: Krishnath M. Jayatilleke and Mark D. Hulett
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:453
  4. The tumor microenvironment (TME) is a critical player in tumor progression, metastasis and therapy outcomes. Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) are a well-recognized core element of the TME and generally char...

    Authors: Ilseon Hwang, Jeong Won Kim, Kris Ylaya, Eun Joo Chung, Haruhisa Kitano, Candice Perry, Jun Hanaoka, Junya Fukuoka, Joon-Yong Chung and Stephen M. Hewitt
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:443
  5. Breast cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease, this poses challenges for classification and management. Long non-coding RNAs play acrucial role in the breast cancersdevelopment and progression, especially in...

    Authors: Wei Ma, Fangkun Zhao, Xinmiao Yu, Shu Guan, Huandan Suo, Zuo Tao, Yue Qiu, Yunfei Wu, Yu Cao and Feng Jin
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:442
  6. Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibitors (PARPis) specifically target homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) cells and display good therapeutic effect in women with advanced-stage BRCA1/2-mutated breast and e...

    Authors: Razan Sheta, Magdalena Bachvarova, Marie Plante, Marie-Claude Renaud, Alexandra Sebastianelli, Jean Gregoire, Jamilet Miranda Navarro, Ricardo Bringas Perez, Jean-Yves Masson and Dimcho Bachvarov
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:439
  7. Accumulating evidence has demonstrated that immune-related lncRNAs (IRLs) are commonly aberrantly expressed in breast cancer (BC). Thus, we aimed to establish an IRL-based tool to improve prognosis prediction ...

    Authors: Jianguo Lai, Bo Chen, Guochun Zhang, Xuerui Li, Hsiaopei Mok and Ning Liao
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:416
  8. Cancer Associated Macrophage-Like cells (CAMLs) are polynucleated circulating stromal cells found in the bloodstream of numerous solid-tumor malignancies. Variations within CAML size have been associated with ...

    Authors: Daniel J. Gironda, Daniel L. Adams, Jianzhong He, Ting Xu, Hui Gao, Yawei Qiao, Ritsuko Komaki, James M. Reuben, Zhongxing Liao, Mariela Blum-Murphy, Wayne L. Hofstetter, Cha-Mei Tang and Steven H. Lin
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:413
  9. Methyltransferase-like 3 (METTL3) is a member of the m6A methyltransferase family and acts as an oncogene in cancers. Recent studies suggest that host innate immunity is regulated by the enzymes controlling m6A e...

    Authors: Huan-he Ni, Lin Zhang, He Huang, Shu-qin Dai and Jiang Li
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:393
  10. The non-classical human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-G is a strong immunomodulatory molecule. Under physiological conditions, HLA-G induces immunological tolerance in immune privileged tissues, while under pathophy...

    Authors: Michael Friedrich, Christine Stoehr, Simon Jasinski-Bergner, Arndt Hartmann, Sven Wach, Bernd Wullich, André Steven and Barbara Seliger
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:371
  11. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are crucial to the malignant behaviour and poor prognosis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). In recent years, CSC biology has been widely studied, but practical prognostic sig...

    Authors: Zengyu Feng, Minmin Shi, Kexian Li, Yang Ma, Lingxi Jiang, Hao Chen and Chenghong Peng
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:360
  12. Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the most lethal disease among female genital malignant tumors. Peptidylarginine deiminase type II(PADI II) has been shown to enhance a variety of cancers carcinogenesis, incl...

    Authors: Lidong Liu, Zhiwei Zhang, Guoxiang Zhang, Ting Wang, Yingchun Ma and Wei Guo
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:357
  13. Distal cholangiocarcinoma is an aggressive malignancy with a dismal prognosis. Diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for distal cholangiocarcinoma are lacking. The aim of the present study was to identify diffe...

    Authors: Johannes Byrling, Theresa Kristl, Dingyuan Hu, Indira Pla, Aniel Sanchez, Agata Sasor, Roland Andersson, György Marko-Varga and Bodil Andersson
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:343
  14. Hypoxia plays an indispensable role in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, there are few studies on the application of hypoxia molecules in the prognosis predicting of HCC. We aim to id...

    Authors: Baohui Zhang, Bufu Tang, Jianyao Gao, Jiatong Li, Lingming Kong and Ling Qin
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:342
  15. Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is an aggressive neoplasm of the pleura, mainly related to asbestos exposure. As in other solid tumors, malignant cells exhibit high glucose uptake and glycolytic rates wit...

    Authors: Irene Dell’Anno, Elisa Barone, Luciano Mutti, Doris M. Rassl, Stefan J. Marciniak, Roberto Silvestri, Stefano Landi and Federica Gemignani
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:341
  16. Duodenal adenocarcinoma (DA) is a rare yet aggressive malignancy, with increasing incidence in the last decades. Its low frequency has hampered a thorough understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease and o...

    Authors: G. Donisi, G. Capretti, N. Cortese, A. Rigamonti, F. Gavazzi, G. Nappo, A. Pulvirenti, M. Sollai, P. Spaggiari, A. Zerbi and F. Marchesi
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:340
  17. Immune-related genes (IRGs) have been confirmed to have an important role in tumorigenesis and tumor microenvironment formation. Nevertheless, a systematic analysis of IRGs and their clinical significance in s...

    Authors: Chuan Hu, Bo Chen, Zhangheng Huang, Chuan Liu, Lin Ye, Cailin Wang, Yuexin Tong, Jiaxin Yang and Chengliang Zhao
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:337
  18. African American women experience a twofold higher incidence of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and are 40% more likely to die from breast cancer than women of other ethnicities. However, the molecular ba...

    Authors: Xuan Yang, Mohamed Amgad, Lee A. D. Cooper, Yuhong Du, Haian Fu and Andrey A. Ivanov
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:334
  19. Recently, it has been reported that miRNA is involved in pterygium, however the exact underlying mechanism in pterygium is unrevealed and require further investigation.

    Authors: Siying He, Yifang Huang, Shiqi Dong, Chen Qiao, Guohua Yang, Shuai Zhang, Chen Wang, Yuting Xu, Fang Zheng and Ming Yan
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:332
  20. Colon cancer is a disease with high malignancy and incidence in the world. Tumor immune microenvironment (TIM) and tumor mutational burden (TMB) have been proved to play crucial roles in predicting clinical ou...

    Authors: Xinyi Wang, Jinzhong Duanmu, Xiaorui Fu, Taiyuan Li and Qunguang Jiang
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:324
  21. Treatment of human lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) using current targeted therapies is limited because of their diverse somatic mutations without any specific dominant driver mutations. These mutational di...

    Authors: Hae-Yun Jung, Tae Ho Kim, Jong-Eun Lee, Hong Kwan Kim, Jong Ho Cho, Yong Soo Choi, Sumin Shin, Se-Hoon Lee, Hwanseok Rhee, Hee Kyung Lee, Hyun Jung Choi, Hye Yoon Jang, Seungjae Lee, Jung Hee Kang, Young Ae Choi, Sanghyuk Lee…
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:307
  22. Immunotherapies targeting glioblastoma (GBM) have led to significant improvements in patient outcomes. TOX is closely associated with the immune environment surrounding tumors, but its role in gliomas is not f...

    Authors: Hao Zhang, Fan Fan, Yuanqiang Yu, Zeyu Wang, Fangkun Liu, Ziyu Dai, Liyang Zhang, Zhixiong Liu and Quan Cheng
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:305

    The Correction to this article has been published in Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:368

  23. Bladder cancer (BlCa) taxonomy has proved its impact in patient outcome and selection for targeted therapies, but such transcriptomic-based classification has not yet translated to routine practice. Moreover, ...

    Authors: João Lobo, Sara Monteiro-Reis, Catarina Guimarães-Teixeira, Paula Lopes, Isa Carneiro, Carmen Jerónimo and Rui Henrique
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:303
  24. The tumor immune microenvironment is a heterogeneous entity. Gene expression analysis allows us to perform comprehensive immunoprofiling and may assist in dissecting the different components of the immune infi...

    Authors: W. S. M. E. Theelen, O. Krijgsman, K. Monkhorst, T. Kuilman, D. D. G. C. Peters, S. Cornelissen, M. A. Ligtenberg, S. M. Willems, J. L. G. Blaauwgeers, C. J. M. van Noesel, D. S. Peeper, M. M. van den Heuvel and K. Schulze
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:271
  25. Few studies have delved into the prevalence of distant metastasis (DM +) and survival for patients with lymph node metastases (LN +) by primary site. We aimed to detect differences in distant metastasis and pr...

    Authors: Xin Lou, Jun Li, Ya-Qing Wei, Zhi-Jia Jiang, Ming Chen and Jin-Jin Sun
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:266
  26. Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) mouse models of cancer have been recognized as better mouse models that recapitulate the characteristics of original malignancies including preserved tumor heterogeneity, lineag...

    Authors: Zhenyang Liu, Michael Ho-Young Ahn, Tomohiro Kurokawa, Amy Ly, Gong Zhang, Fuyou Wang, Teppei Yamada, Ananthan Sadagopan, Jane Cheng, Cristina R. Ferrone, Andrew S. Liss, Kim C. Honselmann, Gregory R. Wojtkiewicz, Soldano Ferrone and Xinhui Wang
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:255
  27. Although oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC) with human papillomavirus (HPV) infection has a good prognosis, the accurate prediction of survival and risk of treatment failure is essential to design d...

    Authors: Soohyeon Kwon, Soon-Hyun Ahn, Woo-Jin Jeong, Young Ho Jung, Yun Jung Bae, Jin Ho Paik, Jin-Haeng Chung and Hyojin Kim
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:240
  28. Cancer-related mortality in patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) is predominantly caused by development of colorectal liver metastases (CLMs). How to screen the sensitive chemotherapy and targeted therapy is ...

    Authors: Mi Jian, Li Ren, Guodong He, Qi Lin, Wentao Tang, Yijiao Chen, Jingwen Chen, Tianyu Liu, Meiling Ji, Ye Wei, Wenju Chang and Jianmin Xu
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:234
  29. As a nucleolar protein associated with ribosome biogenesis, pescadillo homolog 1 (PES1) has been reported to participate in the development of many cancers. However, its role in prostate cancer is not clearly ...

    Authors: Zhenming Jiang, Yuxi Zhang, Xi Chen, Yan Wang, Pingeng Wu, Chengzhang Wu and Dong Chen
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:209
  30. Patients with metastatic uveal melanoma (MUM) in the liver usually die within 1 year. The development of new treatments for MUM has been limited by the lack of diverse MUM cell lines and appropriate animal mod...

    Authors: Takahito Sugase, Bao Q. Lam, Meggie Danielson, Mizue Terai, Andrew E. Aplin, J. Silvio Gutkind and Takami Sato
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:208
  31. Most tumors develop abnormal fibrotic regions consisting of fibroblasts, immune cells, and a dense extracellular matrix (ECM) immersed in a viscous interstitial fluid, and an abundant fibrotic tumor microenvir...

    Authors: Anette Hauge and Einar K. Rofstad
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:207
  32. Increasing evidences have found that the clinical importance of the interaction between hypoxia and immune status in gastric cancer microenvironment. However, reliable prognostic signatures based on combinatio...

    Authors: Yifan Liu, Jianhua Wu, Weiwei Huang, Shaowen Weng, Baochun Wang, Yiming Chen and Hao Wang
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:201
  33. Osteosarcoma is a highly metastatic primary bone tumor that predominantly affects adolescents and young adults. A mainstay of treatment in osteosarcoma is removal of the primary tumor. However, surgical excisi...

    Authors: Michelle P. Kallis, Caroline Maloney, Brandon Blank, Samuel Z. Soffer, Marc Symons and Bettie M. Steinberg
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:183
  34. Systemic inflammatory response in colorectal cancer (CRC) has been established as a prognostic factor for impaired cancer-specific survival, predominantly in patients with right-sided tumors. On the other hand...

    Authors: Ulf Gunnarsson, Karin Strigård, Sofia Edin, Ioannis Gkekas, Harri Mustonen, Tuomas Kaprio, Camilla Böckelman, Jaana Hagström, Richard Palmqvist and Caj Haglund
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:178
  35. Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most prevalent cancers that occur in men worldwide. Autophagy-related genes (ARGs) may play an essential role in multiple biological processes of prostate cancer. However, A...

    Authors: Daixing Hu, Li Jiang, Shengjun Luo, Xin Zhao, Hao Hu, Guozhi Zhao and Wei Tang
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:160
  36. Despite considering vast majority of the transcribed molecules as merely noise RNA in the last decades, recent advances in the field of molecular biology revealed the mysterious role of long non-coding RNAs (l...

    Authors: Hossein Mozdarani, Vahid Ezzatizadeh and Roghayeh Rahbar Parvaneh
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:152
  37. Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most prevalent cancers worldwide. Due to its high morbidity and mortality rates, it is urgent to find a molecular target that contributes to esophageal c...

    Authors: Rui Cai, Ping Wang, Xin Zhao, Xiansheng Lu, Ruxia Deng, Xiaoyu Wang, Zhaoji Su, Chang Hong and Jie Lin
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:139
  38. Gastric cancer is associated with chronic inflammation, but there is still much to understand about the tumor microenvironment and the underlying tumor-promoting mechanisms. The Map kinase-activated protein ki...

    Authors: Fares Qeadan, Pranshu Bansal, Joshua A. Hanson and Ellen J. Beswick
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:137
  39. The most appropriate management for patients with stage IV ovarian cancer remains unclear. Our objective was to understand the main determinants associated with survival and to discuss best surgical management.

    Authors: Yohann Dabi, Cyrille Huchon, Lobna Ouldamer, Sofiane Bendifallah, Pierre Collinet, Alexandre Bricou, Emile Daraï, Marcos Ballester, Vincent Lavoue, Bassam Haddad and Cyril Touboul
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:134
  40. Identifying the early-stage colon adenocarcinoma (ECA) patients who have lower risk cancer vs. the higher risk cancer could improve disease prognosis. Our study aimed to explore whether the glandular morpholog...

    Authors: Meng-Yao Ji, Lei Yuan, Shi-Min Lu, Meng-Ting Gao, Zhi Zeng, Na Zhan, Yi-Juan Ding, Zheng-Ru Liu, Ping-Xiao Huang, Cheng Lu and Wei-Guo Dong
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:129
  41. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is a malignancy characterized by metabolic reprogramming. ABAT and ALDH6A1 are metabolic enzymes. In this study, we aim to investigate the associations of ABAT and ALDH6...

    Authors: Jun Lu, Zhan Chen, Hu Zhao, Huiyue Dong, Ling Zhu, Yi Zhang, Jie Wang, Hehuan Zhu, Qiang Cui, Chuang Qi, Shuiliang Wang, Shushang Chen and Jichun Shao
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:101
  42. An increasing number of anti-cancer therapeutic agents target specific mutant proteins that are expressed by many different tumor types. Successful use of these therapies is dependent on the presence or absenc...

    Authors: Sinead Toomey, Aoife Carr, Mateusz Janusz Mezynski, Yasir Elamin, Shereen Rafee, Mattia Cremona, Clare Morgan, Stephen Madden, Khairun I. Abdul-Jalil, Kathy Gately, Angela Farrelly, Elaine W. Kay, Susan Kennedy, Kenneth O’Byrne, Liam Grogan, Oscar Breathnach…
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:99
  43. The aim of this study was to investigate the expression of the nuclear receptor PPARγ, together with that of the cyclooxygenases Cox-1 and Cox-2, in breast cancer (BC) tissues and to correlate the data with se...

    Authors: Wanting Shao, Christina Kuhn, Doris Mayr, Nina Ditsch, Magdalena Kailuwait, Verena Wolf, Nadia Harbeck, Sven Mahner, Udo Jeschke, Vincent Cavaillès and Sophie Sixou
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:94
  44. Metabolic reprogramming, immune evasion and tumor-promoting inflammation are three hallmarks of cancer that provide new perspectives for understanding the biology of cancer. We aimed to figure out the relation...

    Authors: Wenhui Li, Ming Xu, Yu Li, Ziwei Huang, Jun Zhou, Qiuyang Zhao, Kehao Le, Fang Dong, Cheng Wan and Pengfei Yi
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:92
  45. The p.E318K variant of the Melanocyte Inducing Transcription Factor (MITF) has been implicated in genetic predisposition to melanoma as an intermediate penetrance allele. However, the impact of this variant on cl...

    Authors: Giulia Ciccarese, Bruna Dalmasso, William Bruno, Paola Queirolo, Lorenza Pastorino, Virginia Andreotti, Francesco Spagnolo, Enrica Tanda, Giovanni Ponti, Cesare Massone, Francesco Drago, Aurora Parodi, Giovanni Ghigliotti, Maria Antonietta Pizzichetta and Paola Ghiorzo
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:78
  46. Pancreatic cancer is a major cause of cancer-related mortality. The identification of effective biomarkers is essential in order to improve management of the disease. Yes-associated protein 1 (YAP1) is a downs...

    Authors: Qimin Zhou, Monika Bauden, Roland Andersson, Dingyuan Hu, György Marko-Varga, Jianfeng Xu, Agata Sasor, Hua Dai, Krzysztof Pawłowski, Katarzyna Said Hilmersson, Xi Chen and Daniel Ansari
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:77
  47. With the gradual unveiling of tumour heterogeneity, cancer stem cells (CSCs) are now being considered the initial component of tumour initiation. However, the mechanisms of the growth and maintenance of breast...

    Authors: Jianying Pei, Yanxia Wang and Yan Li
    Citation: Journal of Translational Medicine 2020 18:74

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