Macrophages as predictors and new targets for immunotherapy in colorectal cancer
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The new 2026 CRC/TAM review is interesting for Bex, as it lists the TAMs associated with poor prognosis: CD163+, CD206+, SPP1+, and Stabilin-1 (Clever-1)+ macrophages.
The big message of the paper is that immunotherapy resistance in CRC is not just a T-cell PD-1 issue, but a comprehensive TME/TAM (tumor microenvironment/tumor-associated macrophage) issue.
Julia Kzhyshkowska is not just a random TAM review author, but one of the long-term core researchers in the Stabilin-1/Clever-1 field. She has been researching macrophages at Heidelberg University since the early 2000s and published articles on Stabilin-1 as early as 2006. She has shown, for example, that Stabilin-1 is also linked to human breast cancer and tumor growth in preclinical models.
The TAM review she published earlier in 2024 is a significant background paper for Bex. She is a researcher not affiliated with Faron.
Targeting of TAMs: can we be more clever than cancer cells?