Study From Researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center Shows Aged Male Fibroblasts Increase Melanoma Treatment Resistance
Source: Fox Chase Cancer Center, September 2024
PHILADELPHIA (September 6, 2024) — In a study published today in the prestigious journal Cell, researchers from Fox Chase Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center showed changes that occur with age in male skin fibroblasts contributed to an increase in the spread of melanoma cells and made cancer cells resistant to targeted therapy.
Fibroblasts are a type of cell that are most common in connective tissue and are essential to wound healing and tissue maintenance. In cases of melanoma, a potentially deadly skin cancer, men are more at risk than women and tend to develop more aggressive, hard-to-treat melanomas, particularly at advanced ages.
“What we wanted to do is combine both the variables of age and biological sex and ask what local tumor microenvironment changes are happening across males and females with advancing age that can answer questions about differences in metastasis and treatment response between patients,” said Yash Chhabra, PhD, lead author on the study and Assistant Professor in the Cancer Signaling and Microenvironment Research Program at Fox Chase. The melanoma tumor microenvironment consists of the fibroblasts in the immediate vicinity of cancer cells that play a key role in the growth of tumors.