Loading
The body's response to injury or infection: immune cells and fluid rush in, causing redness, heat and swelling. Short bursts heal; long-term smouldering inflammation promotes cancer.
Chronic inflammation from infection (hepatitis B and C, H. pylori, HPV), irritation (tobacco, asbestos, acid reflux) or disease (ulcerative colitis) supplies growth factors, free radicals that mutate DNA, and blood-vessel growth, and it is estimated to underlie around a fifth of cancers; 'tumour-promoting inflammation' is a recognised enabling characteristic in the hallmarks of cancer. Yet inflammation is also how the immune system attacks tumours, and an 'inflamed' or 'hot' tumour is one full of T cells that responds well to checkpoint inhibitors. Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs reduce colorectal cancer risk, and the inflammatory markers CRP and IL-6 track cachexia and prognosis.
The best single starting point for a clinician or researcher new to the disease, written by the groups running the Chilean and Indian cohorts; its list of unmet needs is the skeleton of the ideas section on this page.
Typhoid carriage is one of the few modifiable risk factors for gallbladder cancer. In the UK it is rare, but it matters for people who grew up where typhoid is endemic and for the question of whether chronic carriers should be offered cholecystectomy.
This paper is the molecular sequel to the 2002 inflammation and cancer review and the basis for IL-6, JAK-STAT and NF-kB directed strategies in cancer as well as for aspirin and other anti-inflammatory prevention trials.
This paper is why the tumour microenvironment is studied as intensely as the cancer cell itself. It underpins vaccination against HPV and hepatitis B as cancer prevention, aspirin and anti-inflammatory trials in bowel cancer, and the current work on macrophages and myeloid cells as immunotherapy targets.
Together with the 2002 Nature review this essay put inflammation on the cancer research agenda; the tumour-associated macrophage and IL-6 work that followed, and the aspirin prevention trials, trace back to it.
Shares Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi and gallbladder cancer: a case-control study and meta-analysis, Cholecystectomy or ultrasound surveillance for chronic typhoid carriers in endemic regions.
Shares Grivennikov, Greten and Karin 2010: immunity, inflammation and cancer, Cytokine.
Shares Balkwill and Mantovani 2001: inflammation and cancer, back to Virchow?, Macrophage.
Shares Karolina Palucka, Immune system, Hot vs cold tumours.
Shares Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi and gallbladder cancer: a case-control study and meta-analysis, Inflammation & NF-κB.
Shares Grivennikov, Greten and Karin 2010: immunity, inflammation and cancer, Microenvironment and inflammation: tumours as wounds that do not heal.
Shares Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi and gallbladder cancer: a case-control study and meta-analysis, Cholecystectomy or ultrasound surveillance for chronic typhoid carriers in endemic regions.
Shares Macrophage, Immune system, Microenvironment and inflammation: tumours as wounds that do not heal, Theories of cancer: how the ideas connect.