Cancer-Associated Fibroblasts Potentiates Tumor Relapse After Radiotherapy

Proceedings: AACR 107th Annual Meeting 2016; April 16-20, 2016; New Orleans, LACancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) are a major component of cancer stromal cells, about 40∼50% of total cell population in cancer. Our data show that CAFs are distributed into larger area than tumor image revealed by MRI or CT since MRI- or CT- images only represent the core region containing cancer cells. Although the image-guided stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) can precisely deliver radiation does to cancers and decreases radiation side effects, compared to the conventional external beam radiotherapy (EBRT), the data from our retrospective study showed that cancer recurrence including local and remote in patients with conventional EBRT was more frequent than patients with SBRT, and the survival time of patients with EBRT was also longer than patients with SBRT. We also demonstrated that CAFs could promote cancer cells recovery from radiation-induced damage through secreting cytokines/chemokines and exporting intermediate metabolites, which induce cancer cell dormancy and enhance DNA damage repair capacity.Citation Format: Jun Mi, Yongbin Wang, Guifang Gan, Jiangmin Zhao. Cancer-associated fibroblasts potentiates tumor relapse after radiotherapy. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2016 Apr 16-20; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(14 Suppl):Abstract nr 1580.