An Interview with
Johanna Joyce "My overall goal is to learn how applicable the findings from one tumor environment are to other types of tumors" 
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The microenvironment in which a tumor arises can have a critical influence on tumor progression. The normal tissue stroma provides both positive and negative signals to the cancer cells, and normal cells can in fact be co-opted or modified by the cancer cells to produce a variety of growth factors, chemokines and matrix-degrading enzymes that enhance the proliferation and invasion of the tumor. The normal cells that constitute the tumor microenvironment include the blood and lymphatic vascular networks, stromal fibroblasts, infiltrating immune cells and the extracellular matrix [Figure 1]. Adding to this complexity, each component of the microenvironment can interact with many other normal cells in addition to the tumor cells, so that each cell type is effectively a member of a tissue ecosystem, in which the functions of individual cells impact on the organ or tumor as a whole. The focus of our laboratory is to define and understand the mechanisms used by tumor cells to hijack the functions of normal host cells, using mouse models of cancer and cell co-culture systems. We hope to then apply this knowledge to develop targeted cancer therapies that disrupt these tumor-host interactions.
