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. 2023 Apr 13;9:124. doi: 10.1038/s41420-023-01428-8

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — The origin of CAFs can be quite heterogeneous, and the main sources of CAFs in TME are NFs. Growth factors like TGF-1 and stromal SDF-1 can be secreted by tumor cells to enable the conversion of NFs into CAFs, and CAFs in the tumor stroma do not undergo apoptosis. Other sources of CAFs include direct generation from MSCs, which can migrate to tumor sites in a way akin to fibroblast migration during wound healing. These migratory cells are drawn to cancer and differentiate into CAFs as a result of their attraction to the disease. In their cytoplasm, these CAFs exhibit particular markers such -SMA, FAP, TNC, and TSP-1. Moreover, epithelial cells can undergo EMT to develop into CAFs, and these CAFs maintain the genetic changes made to the parental genome. Due to the expression of mesenchymal lineage-committed marker genes, CAFs also originate from adipocytes. Endothelial and pericyte cells have the ability to transdifferentiate and add to the CAF population. Proliferating endothelial cells can undergo endothelial to mesenchymal conversions to develop CAFs under the effect of TGF-1 produced by cancer. By the influence of PDGF-BB, pericytes are also a source of CAFs. (Created with BioRender.com).