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. 2021 Dec 20;20:171. doi: 10.1186/s12943-021-01464-x

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open AccessThis 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 licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence 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 licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 2 — The potential functions of epigenetic modulators in multiple aspects of the TME and immune cycle. First, epigenetic drugs may induce ICD of cancer cells, enhance the expression of various tumor-associated antigens (TAAs), MHC molecules, and the generation of APC, thus enhancing immune cell priming and effector T cell recognition of tumor target cells. DNMTi, HDACi and HMTi (EZH2 and G9a) have demonstrated such biological effects [114–116]. Secondly, epigenetic drugs may target a variety of types of immune cells, resulting in reduced generation and accumulation of MDSC [117, 118], and inhibited differentiation and function of Treg (e.g., EZH2i) [119–121]. Third, during these processes, the drugs commonly result in compensatory increases in the production of effector T cells-chemokines and the activation of effector (anti-tumor) T cells, with therapeutic synergy observed for combined use with immune checkpoint blockade agents. The detailed effects of various classes of inhibitors have been discussed under various Sections. This figure is modified from Chen X. et al., 2020 [122]