Tumor Microenvironment and Cell Fusion

Figure 1

Schematic summarizing fusion between tumor cells and endothelial cells under TNF-α-induced inflammatory environment in our previous studies. TNF-α upregulated the expression of VCAM-1 and ASCT-2 on vascular endothelium and upregulated the expression of VLA-4 and syncytin-1 on cancer cells, respectively, to promote tumor–endothelial cell fusion.