Figure 2.

Overview of the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME) and important contributors to tumor progression: Within the TME, there is a dynamic relationship between peritumoral and intratumoral components that include immune cells, cancer cells, and the stromal elements often exhibiting context-dependent functionality. Different components of the TME carry out pro- or anti-tumor functions, and such polarizations are caused by reciprocal interactions with physical and biochemical cues from the surroundings. The polarized functions are not distinctive but rather heterogenous contributing to an immunosuppressive TME [5,19,20,28,29,35,39,40,46,48,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75].