title: More than a scaffold: Stromal modulation of tumor immunity.
abstract: Current clinical success with anti-cancer immunotherapy provides exciting new treatment opportunities. While encouraging, more needs to be done to induce durable effects in a higher proportion of patients. Increasing anti-tumor effector T cell quantity or quality alone does not necessarily correlate with therapeutic outcome. Instead, the tumor microenvironment is a critical determinant of anti-cancer responsiveness to immunotherapy and can confer profound resistance. Yet, the tumor-promoting environment - due to its enormous plasticity - also delivers the best opportunities for adjuvant therapy aiming at recruiting, priming and sustaining anti-tumor cytotoxicity. While the tumor environment as an entity is increasingly well understood, current interventions are still broad and often systemic. In contrast, tumors grow in a highly compartmentalized environment which includes the vascular/perivascular niche, extracellular matrix components and in some tumors lymph node aggregates; all of these structures harbor and instruct subsets of immune cells. Targeting and re-programming specific compartments may provide better opportunities for adjuvant immunotherapy.
authors.affiliation: Vascular Biology and Stromal Targeting, Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, The University of Western Australia, Centre for Medical Research, Nedlands, Western Australia 6009, Australia.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Johansson
authors.affiliation: Targeted Drug Delivery, Imaging and Therapy, Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, The University of Western Australia, Centre for Medical Research, Nedlands, Western Australia 6009, Australia.
authors.forename: Juliana
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hamzah
authors.affiliation: Vascular Biology and Stromal Targeting, Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, The University of Western Australia, Centre for Medical Research, Nedlands, Western Australia 6009, Australia. Electronic address: ganss@perkins.uwa.edu.au.
authors.forename: Ruth
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ganss
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005109:Extracellular Matrix / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007167:Immunotherapy; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000098:blood supply / Q000276:immunology* / Q000628:therapy; D013601:T-Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology; D059016:Tumor Microenvironment
keywords: Angiogenesis; Ectopic lymph nodes; Extracellular matrix; Immunotherapy; Stroma; T cell trafficking