Lipid-Laden Macrophages cross the Border to Cancer

Abstract

Within atherosclerotic plaques, macrophages can take up cholesterol and thereby become lipid-laden cells. For long it has been thought that these foamy macrophages are the main contributors to chronic inflammatory responses in plaques. However, several publications lately highlighted that foamy plaque macrophages are less inflammatory than their non-foamy counterparts. Interestingly, a very recent EMBO Molecular Medicine paper by Wu et al. demonstrate that accumulation of lipids in tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) elicits an immunosuppressive phenotype.