Cancer stem cell-immune cell crosstalk in breast tumor microenvironment: a determinant of therapeutic facet

Aishwarya Guha; Kuntal Kanti Goswami; Jasmine Sultana; Nilanjan Ganguly; Pritha Roy Choudhury; Mohona Chakravarti; Avishek Bhuniya; Anirban Sarkar; Saurav Bera; Sukanya Dhar; Juhina Das; Tapasi Das; Rathindranath Baral; Anamika Bose; Saptak Banerjee

doi:10.3389/fimmu.2023.1245421

Cancer stem cell-immune cell crosstalk in breast tumor microenvironment: a determinant of therapeutic facet

Front Immunol. 2023 Nov 27:14:1245421. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2023.1245421. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Immunoregulation and Immunodiagnostics, Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, Kolkata, India.
² Department of Microbiology, Asutosh College, Kolkata, India.
³ Department of Pharmaceutical Technology Biotechnology National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) Sahibzada Ajit Singh (S.A.S.) Nagar, Mohali, Punjab, India.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Breast cancer (BC) is globally one of the leading killers among women. Within a breast tumor, a minor population of transformed cells accountable for drug resistance, survival, and metastasis is known as breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs). Several experimental lines of evidence have indicated that BCSCs influence the functionality of immune cells. They evade immune surveillance by altering the characteristics of immune cells and modulate the tumor landscape to an immune-suppressive type. They are proficient in switching from a quiescent phase (slowly cycling) to an actively proliferating phenotype with a high degree of plasticity. This review confers the relevance and impact of crosstalk between immune cells and BCSCs as a fate determinant for BC prognosis. It also focuses on current strategies for targeting these aberrant BCSCs that could open avenues for the treatment of breast carcinoma.

Keywords: adaptive immune cells; breast cancer (BC); breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs); innate immune cells; tumor microenvironment (TME).

Publication types

Review
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Animals
Breast Neoplasms* / pathology
Cell Line, Tumor
Female
Humans
Mammary Neoplasms, Animal* / pathology
Neoplastic Stem Cells / metabolism
Prognosis

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work is partially supported by Council of Scientific and Industrial Reserach (CSIR), New Delhi to AG (File No: 09/030(0086)/2019-EMR-I), Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi to JS (File No: 3/2/2/63/2022-NCD-III), University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi to PC (File No: 191620061322) in addition to institutional support. These funding agencies had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or the preparation of this manuscript.