Month: July 2016

Chemokine cascades drive the education of metastasis-promoting macrophages

Written by Caroline Anderson

Edited by William Foster and Arunon Sivananthan

This week we were fortunate enough to welcome a world-renowned biomedical scientist to the IRD journal club. Professor Jeffrey Pollard is currently the Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh. His seminar earlier in the day had focussed on the role of the tumour microenvironment, and metastasis-associated macrophages (MAMs) in particular, in breast cancer metastasis. Much of the work he discussed can be found here: Kitamura et al, JEM, 2015 (PMID: 26056232).

Both pro- and anti-tumorigenic immune cells are found in association with tumours.