VEGF-C expression in TAMs rewires the metastatic fate of breast cancer cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Expression of pro-lymphangiogenic vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGF-C) in primary tumors correlates with the occurrence of proximal lymph node metastasis in most solid cancer types. However, the role of VEGF-C in regulating tumor cell dissemination to distant organs is currently unclear. Perivascular tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) are key regulators of hematogenous cancer cell spreading, forming tumor microenvironment of metastasis (TMEM) doorways for breast cancer cells to intravasate tumor blood vessels and fuel distant metastases. Using an experimental breast cancer (BC) model, we show here that TAMs expressing VEGF-C decrease cancer cell dissemination to the lung while enhancing lymph node metastasis. These TAMs express podoplanin and associate with normalized tumor blood vessels expressing VEGFR3. Further clinical data reveal that VEGF-C + TAMs correlate inversely with malignant grade and with the occurrence of TMEM complexes in a cohort of BC patients. Thus, our study displays an apparently paradoxical role of VEGF-C expressing TAMs in redirecting cancer cells to preferentially disseminate to the lymph nodes, at least in part, by normalizing tumor blood vessels and promoting lymphangiogenesis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".