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Issue 302: Stroma shapes tumor evolution, growth dynamics, and metastasis. In non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), stroma secretes paracrine factors that enhance tumor cells' survival under targeted therapies. Understanding stroma-tumor cells' spatial interactions could offer insights into the molecular mechanisms behind these cross-talks and lead to the design of new drugs focusing on these interactions. Moreover, the stroma-tumor cells' spatial relationship changes under treatment, suggesting the emergence of drug tolerance or resistance. We combined experimental data with ecology and physics-based spatial analysis methods to quantify the stromal effects in NSCLC in the presence or absence of treatment. We used the extracted parameters to build an ABM and investigate the potential mechanisms to disrupt or diminish these effects. Our results indicate that the stroma’s activity and radius of the impact are the main aspects influencing the drug-sheltering potential of stroma under targeted therapies. Based on the paper: Dissecting the Spatially Restricted Effects of Microenvironment-Mediated Resistance on Targeted Therapy Responses published in Cancers.