What does the area around a tumor tell us about response to treatment? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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How tumors respond to treatment has to do with both their internal and external environments, research by Valsamo Anagnostou, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues has shown.

Anagnostou: The way we do this is by looking very deeply in the cancer cells and the adjacent tissues, what we call the tumor microenvironment and how inflamed or hot the tumor microenvironment is, how many immune cells are practically in that tumor microenvironment. Normally that with response and resistance to immunotherapy the idea being that the more inflamed the tumor microenvironment is, hotter it is the greater the response to therapy, the magnitude of the response that we get with immunotherapy.  :33

Anagnostou says ways to convert tumor microenvironments from cold to hot exist and are being investigated, and says looking at this characteristic of tumors has implications for the success of treatment. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.