Vall d'Hebron Talks by VHIR 'Targeting of monocytes and tumor-associated macrophages in cancer: lessons and perspectives'

Speaker: Dr. Julia Kzhyshkowska, Head of Dept. of Innate Immunity and Tolerance. Institute of Transfusion Medicine and Immunology, Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University.

ÀBSTRACT
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death, reduced quality of life and disability worldwide. cancer-specific and patient-specific programming of innate immunity is needed for in the success in development of new anticancer therapies, for improving the efficiency of immunotherapeutic tools, and in the personification of conventional therapies needs to consider. Intratumoral TAMs and their precursors, resident macrophages and circulating monocytes, are principal regulators of tumor progression and therapy resistance. The lecture will elucidate the progress in the identification of in subpopulations of circulating monocytes and intratumoral TAMs and their increasing number of biomarkers, indicating their predictive value for the clinical parameters of carcinogenesis and therapy resistance. The state-of-the-art will be presented  in our knowledge on 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. Novel mechanisms involved in the crosstalk between epigenetic, signalling, transcriptional and metabolic pathways in monocytes and TAMs will be addressed. The lecture will next focus on the molecular mechanisms that TAMs use to interfere with anticancer therapeutics, and will summarize and critically evaluate the most advanced data from the clinical trials, which are divided into 4 categories: inhibition of TAM survival and differentiation, inhibition of monocyte/TAM recruitment into tumors, functional reprogramming of TAMs, and genetic engineering of anti-tumor macrophages.

Host: Dr. Matilde LLeonart, Research group leader "Head and neck cancer: Biomedical Research in Tumor Stem Cells" Vall Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR)