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. 2022 Jun 1;12:9099. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-13052-0

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© The Author(s) 2022

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 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/.

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Focal adhesion signaling. (1) ECM and CAFs activating focal FAK in cancer cells leading to cytokine production. These cytokines can finally inhibit CD⁸⁺ T-cell activation. (2) Tumor cells release different cytokines resulting in CAF activation. This can finally cause tumor metastasis and escaping from immune cells induced by activated CAFs. (3) Activated CAFs and tumor cells can release MMPs leading to ECM degradation, which promotes tumor metastasis. *ECM: extracellular matrix; CAFs: cancer associated fibroblasts; FAK: focal adhesion kinase.