There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Chemokines play a paramount role in the tumor progression. Chronic inflammation promotes
tumor formation. Both tumor cells and stromal cells elaborate chemokines and cytokines.
These act either by autocrine or paracrine mechanisms to sustain tumor cell growth,
induce angiogenesis and facilitate evasion of immune surveillance through immunoediting.
The chemokine receptor CXCR2 and its ligands promote tumor angiogenesis and leukocyte
infiltration into the tumor microenvironment. In harsh acidic and hypoxic microenvironmental
conditions tumor cells up-regulate their expression of CXCR4, which equips them to
migrate up a gradient of CXCL12 elaborated by carcinoma-associated fibroblasts (CAFs)
to a normoxic microenvironment. The CXCL12-CXCR4 axis facilitates metastasis to distant
organs and the CCL21-CCR7 chemokine ligand-receptor pair favors metastasis to lymph
nodes. These two chemokine ligand-receptor systems are common key mediators of tumor
cell metastasis for several malignancies and as such provide key targets for chemotherapy.
In this paper, the role of specific chemokines/chemokine receptor interactions in
tumor progression, growth and metastasis and the role of chemokine/chemokine receptor
interactions in the stromal compartment as related to angiogenesis, metastasis, and
immune response to the tumor are reviewed.