Nanotechnology-based photo-immunotherapy: a new hope for inhibition of melanoma growth and metastasis

Abstract

Melanoma is the most aggressive form of skin cancer and there is a need for the development of effective anti-melanoma therapies as it shows high metastatic ability and low response rate. In addition, it has been identified that traditional phototherapy could trigger immunogenic cell death (ICD) to activate antitumor immune response, which could not only effectively arrest primary tumour growth, but also exhibit superior effects in terms of anti-metastasis, anti-recurrence for metastatic melanoma treatment. However, the limited tumour accumulation of photosensitizers/photothermal agents and immunosuppressive tumour microenvironment severely weaken the immune effects. The application of nanotechnology facilitates a higher accumulation of photosensitizers/photothermal agents at the tumour site, which can thus improve the antitumor effects of photo-immunotherapy (PIT). In this review, we summarise the basic principles of nanotechnology-based PIT and highlight novel nanotechnologies that are expected to enhance the antitumor immune response for improved therapeutic efficacy.

Keywords:

• Photothermal therapy
• photodynamic therapy
• immunotherapy
• nanomedicine
• melanoma

Credit author statement

Writing—original draft preparation, Ji-Yuan Zhang, Wei-Dong Gao, Jia-Yi Lin; writing—review and editing, Shan Xu, Li-Jun Zhang, Xin-Chen Lu; review, supervision, funding acquisition Xin Luan, Jian-Qing Peng, Yi Chen. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81960333); Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Action Plan (No.21S11902800); Shanghai Rising-Star Program (No. 22QA1409100); Young Talent Lifting Project of China Association of Chinese Medicine [No. CACM-(2021-QNRC2-A09)]; the High-level Overseas Talent Fund for Home Work From Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (No. RSBLXHGZ202001); the Excellent Young Talents Plan of Guizhou Medical University (No. 2021-103). The figures in this paper were created with BioRender.com.