Chapters authored
Role of Autophagy in Cancer and Tumor Progression
Part of the book: Autophagy - A Double-Edged Sword
Autophagy Regulation of the Tumor Immunity – An Old Machinery for a New Function
Cancer was initially thought to be just a disease of cells with deregulated gene expression. It may be more accurate to consider cancer as a disease of the microenvironment. Despite the remarkable and fairly rapid progress over the past two decades regarding the role of the microenvironment in cancer biology and treatment, our understanding of its actual contribution to cancer resistance is still poor and fragmented. Nevertheless, the microenvironment is now considered to be of critical importance during the initiation and progression of carcinogenesis since it is involved in shaping and remodeling stroma reactivity and in reprogramming phenotypic and functional plasticity. Therefore, the tumor microenvironment represents an important hallmark of cancer, and the challenge now is to better understand how the tumor microenvironment participates in the emergence of immune-resistant tumor cell variants, which appears to be the greatest impediment to successful immunotherapy. In this context, autophagy has recently emerged as a new player in regulating the antitumor immune response under hostile tumor microenvironment. In this review, we will summarize recent data describing how autophagy activation under hypoxic stress impairs the antitumor immune response. In addition, we will discuss how tumor manages to hide from the immune attack and either mounts a “counterattack” or develops resistance to immune cells. In particular, we will focus on the effect of hypoxia-induced autophagy in allowing tumor cells to outmaneuver an effective immune response and escape from immunosurveillance. It is our belief that autophagy may represent a conceptual realm for new immunotherapeutic strategies aiming to block immune escape and therefore providing rational approach to future tumor immunotherapy design.
Part of the book: Cell Death
The Critical Role of Hypoxia in Tumor-Mediated Immunosuppression
Underestimated for a long time, the involvement of the microenvironment has been proven essential for a better understanding of the cancer development. In keeping with this, the tumor is not considered anymore as a mass of malignant cells, but rather as an organ composed of various malignant and nonmalignant cell populations interacting with each other to create the tumor microenvironment. The tumor immune contexture plays a critical role in shaping the tumor immune response, and it is now well supported that such an immune response is impacted by the hypoxic stress within the tumor microenvironment. Tumor hypoxia is closely linked to tumor progression, metastasis, treatment failure, and escape from immune surveillance. Thus, hypoxia seems to be a key factor involved in creating an immune-suppressive tumor by multiple overlapping mechanisms, including the impairment of the function of cytotoxic immune cells, increasing the immunosuppressive properties of immunosuppressive cells, and activating resistance mechanism in the tumor cells. In this chapter, we review some recent findings describing how hypoxic stress in the tumor microenvironment hijacks the antitumor immune response.
Part of the book: Hypoxia and Human Diseases