EDITORIAL article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Inflammation
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1623587
This article is part of the Research TopicDifferential Activation of Cell Death Pathways in Macrophages as a Result of Adaptation to Divergent MicroenvironmentView all 8 articles
Editorial: Differential Activation of Cell Death Pathways in Macrophages as a Result of Adaptation to Divergent Microenvironment
Provisionally accepted
- 1Jagiellonian University, Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology. Department of Immunology, Kraków, Poland
- 2Etablissement Français du Sang AuRA, Grenoble, France
- 3Center for Translational and Molecular Medicine (CTM), Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR) 1231, Université Bourgogne Europe, Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM), Dijon, France
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Macrophages are ubiquitous immune cells residing within tissues, where they play critical roles in recognizing, engulfing, and processing foreign particles, dead cells, and debris. They are highly plastic, rapidly adapting their phenotype and functions in response to local microenvironmental signals (1,2). This plasticity extends to their cell death modalities: while apoptosis typically resolves inflammation and promotes tolerance as well as tissue repair, necroptosis, pyroptosis, and ferroptosis are associated with inflammatory responses of varying intensity (3, 4). Recent advances, notably single-cell technologies, have revealed that the expression and activation of cell death machinery within macrophages are highly context-dependent. Therefore, macrophage death is increasingly recognized as not merely a consequence of injury or dysfunction but also as an active effector mechanism shaping tissue homeostasis and pathologies, as exemplified in atherosclerosis (5-7). This Research Topic aimed to explore the hypothesis that microenvironmental cues modulate the propensity of macrophages to undergo specific cell death pathways, impacting their protective or pathogenic roles across a wide range of diseases. The collected contributions shed light on the diversity of macrophage death responses under various pathological conditions, with a focus on cardiovascular, metabolic, and 36 inflammatory diseases. 37
Keywords: macrophage plasticity, Regulated cell death, Microenvironmental adaptation, Inflammation, Single-cell transcriptomics, ferroptosis, atheroclerosis, macrophage
Received: 06 May 2025; Accepted: 12 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Guzik, Saas and Masson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Philippe Saas, Etablissement Français du Sang AuRA, Grenoble, 25020, France
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