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About the Society The development and maintenance of many cellular systems is tightly regulated by specialized microenvironments. Hematopoiesis, for example, is dependent upon the microenvironment of the bone marrow. T-cell differentiation requires thymic stroma and the microenvironment of mammary glands controls development and modeling of these glands. The concept that microenvironmental factors also play an important role in cancer and in particular in metastasis formation exists for a long time. This concept was however overshadowed by an almost exclusive focus of the cancer research community on the cancer cell genome. This situation has recently changed. The notion that the tumor microenvironment plays a crucial role in cancer development and in its progression is now widely accepted among cancer researchers both at the academia as well as in the biomedical industry. The scientific contributions of researchers involved in cancer microenvironment research and international conferences organized by them via the International Cancer Microenvironment Forum (ICMF) played no minor role in this development. An international conference devoted to all aspects of "Tumor Microenvironment" was held on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel in 1995. This was a truly multidisciplinary event where the focal issue, the tumor microenvironment, was approached and discussed thoroughly by specialists from a wide spectrum of biomedical sciences. The second "Tumor Microenvironment" conference was held in Baden, Austria, in 2002, the third in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2004, and the fourth conference, organized jointly with the American Association of Cancer Research, was held in Florence, Italy, in 2007. All our conferences to date have met, in full, the intentions of the organizers to create a friendly forum that promotes a critical review of novel basic findings and of innovative clinical studies pertaining to the cancer microenvironment. The next "Tumor Microenvironment" conference, organized jointly by the Institut National du Cancer (INCa) and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), will take place in Versailles, France, from October 20 - 24, 2009. In a meeting of the charter members of ICMF hosted by Fernando Vidal-Vanaclocha in San Sebastian, Spain, in 2003, it was unanimously decided to upgrade the Forum into a Society. The International Cancer Microenvironment Society, ICMS, replaces ICMF, undertakes all its activities and thrives to play a significant driving role towards the development of novel, microenvironment-related cancer therapy modalities. In 2007 the International Cancer Microenvironment Society was formally registered in the US and in Israel as a society. All cancer researchers, world wide, from academia, the clinic or from industry are invited herewith to join the new society.