THE TUMOR MICROENVIRONMENT

The tumor microenvironment (Stroma) is the cellular environment in which the tumor exists, including surrounding blood vessels, immune cells, fibroblasts, etc. The tumor and the surrounding microenvironment are closely related and interact constantly.

Tumors can influence the microenvironment by releasing signals promoting tumor growth and inducing peripheral immune tolerance, while stroma cells play a key role in tumor invasion, growth, metastasis, drug resistance and immune suppression.

As compared with cancer cells, stroma cells are also more genetically stable. Therefore, killing the stroma cells with antigen-specific compounds can lead to long-term arrest of tumor growth.

Drugs targeting the tumor stroma introduce a novel mechanism for treating cancer and can work in combination with existing chemo-therapies and immunotherapies targeting cancer cells.

While there are a host of drugs targeting endothelial cell receptors (e.g. VEGF) in the tumor microenvironment, there are no approved therapies targeting other tumor stroma cells, such as the Cancer-Associated Fibroblasts (CAFs), which are the target of NLM001.