Tumor-infiltrating mast cells as potential chemoimmunotherapy enhancer in triple-negative breast cancer

Over the past decade, combining immune checkpoint blockade with chemotherapy has reshaped the paradigm of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), but the cellular dynamics in the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) that orchestrate clinical response remain elusive. In a recent issue of Cancer Cell, Zhang et al integrated murine and human single-cell sequencing data, and unveiled that tumor-infiltrating mast cells (TIMCs) could exert distinct antitumor effects by enriching and fueling various immune cell clusters, suggesting the pivotal tuning role of TIMCs in the TIME of TNBC, as well as paving promising avenues for future TIMC-targeting therapies in synergy with chemoimmunotherapy against TNBC.