Jing He, 1 Peihao Yin, 1–4 Ke Xu 1, 3, 4 1Putuo Hospital, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of General Surgery, Putuo Hospital, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 3Shanghai Putuo Central School of Clinical Medicine, Anhui Medicine University, Anhui, People’s Republic of China; 4Interventional Cancer Institute of Chinese Integrative Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Peihao Yin; Ke XuPutuo Hospital, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail [email protected]; [email protected]: Traditional Eye Care Chinese medicine (TCM) has been used as a significant cancer treatment method for many years in China.
It has been demonstrated that TCM could assist in inhibiting the growth of tumors and prolonging the survival rates of cancer patients.Although the mechanism of TCM are still not clear, accumulating evidence has shown that they may be related to the tumor microenvironment (TME).Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) play a significant role in TME and are polarized to two phenotypes, M1 (classically activated) and M2 (alternatively activated) TAMs.The two different phenotypes of TAMs play converse roles in the TME and M2-polarized tumor-associated macrophages (M2-TAMs) always lead to poor prognosis in cancer patients compared to M1-polarized tumor-associated macrophages (M1-TAMs).In this review, the potential correlation between TCM and TAMs (especially the M2 phenotype) in tumor progression and promising TCM strategies targeting TAMs in cancer are discussed.
Keywords: traditional Chinese medicine, TCM, tumor-associated Hats macrophages, TAMs, tumor microenvironment.