Martine BEN AMAR - Immunity and cancer: a physical perspective for lung cancer carcinoma (Prix des Trois Physiciens 2024)

Wednesday, April 02, 2025
1:30 p.m. — ConfIV (E244)

Immunity and cancer: a physical perspective for lung cancer carcinoma

In this talk I will present the role of the immune system in the early development of lung cancer. The study is based on recent in vitro experiments on the mixing of cancer cells, alveolar macrophages and fibroblasts in the group of P.Benaroch (Institut Curie), on physical data we can extract by analyzing the non-trivial process of aggregation and finally on a theoretical representation of the tumor and its stroma.  In patients, the tumor stroma consists mainly of extracellular matrix, fibroblasts, immune cells and vasculature. Its structure and functions are altered during malignancy: tumor cells transform fibroblasts into cancer-associated fibroblasts, which exhibit immunosuppressive activities on which growth and metastasis depend.  These include exclusion of immune cells from the tumor nest, proliferation of fibers, and T-cell inhibition. With a spatio-dynamical systems of the cell distribution, the  variety of  possible outcomes are explored which depends on the parameter values for each patient, and leads to either tumor invasion, persistence, or eradication as a result of the interplay between cancer cell growth, T cell cytotoxicity and fibroblast activity.

J. Nikolic, J. Ackermann… MBA, J-F Joanny   and P. Benaroch,  ResearchSquare preprint (2024)

J. Ackermann, C. Bernard, P. Sirven, H. Salmon, M. Fraldi, M. Ben Amar, 

How cancer-associated fibroblasts promote T-cell exclusion in human lung tumors: a physical perspective,Bioarchiv  and elife 2024