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Author Pintaluba Pérez, Mònica |
Abstract Cancer is a disease of uncontrolled cellular proliferation and growth. Nowadays, the most common therapies employed for cancer treatment are surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Both of these last treatments cause many unpleasant side effects and that is why there is a lot of ongoing research to search for new therapies. These are immunotherapies, they are based on reactivating the immune system in order to fight the tumour. Many of them are focused on the tumour microenvironment (TME) as cancer cells together with immune and other cell types, can be found there. In the TME, tumour cells educate surrounding cells or tissues to undergo changes that will allow the tumour to progress, therefore it is the main responsible for tumour resistance, which the two main factors involved are immunosuppression and cancer cells’ stemness. For this reason, the TME has become an important therapeutic target. Therefore, this project will be focused on identifying cell surface markers on this environment. Firstly, the expression of the surface cell marker CD44 will be identified by flow cytometry as it plays an important role in cancer stemness, tumour initiation and metastasis; which is one of the main tumour resistance mechanisms. Secondly, macrophages will be identified and their polarization controlled, to avoid immunosuppressive M2 macrophages differentiation. |
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Director Fornaguera i Puigvert, Cristina |
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Degree IQS SE - Undergraduate Program in Biotechnology |
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Date 2021-06-21
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