Nanomedicine for Cancer Immunotherapy
Cancer Immunotherapy is a therapy used to treat cancer patients that involves or uses components of the immune system, including antibodies (e.g. anti-PD1/PD-L1), vaccines and T cell infusions, which is a revolutionized technology in oncology. Cancer immunotherapy has made great progress in the past decades and it is thought to be the effective strategy of achieving the long-term success of cancer treatment. Despite parts of clinical successes, some issues, including low patient response rates, adverse effects/immune-related toxicities, and acquired immune resistance are still needed to be solved. The development of new nanoparticles, including lipid nanoparticles, nano-sized metal-organic frameworks, polymeric nanoparticles/micelles/nanogels, inorganic nanoparticles and cell membrane derived system, have offered effective solutions for targeting delivery of the cargos, boosting antitumor immune responses, sensitizing tumor to immunotherapy, and/or reducing adverse effects. Nanomedicines can also remodel the tumor immune-microenvironment, induce immunogenic cell death(ICD) of cencer cells to improve cancer immunotherapy and even realize sequentially release of different drugs to induce cascade immune response. Furthermore, combination of nanotechnology and immunotherapy offers new perspective for strengthening antitumor immune responses. For example, clinic trials have proved advantages of treatment strategy of the albumin paclitaxel nanoparticle-PD-L1 monoclonal antibody combination therapy. This Article Collection aims to show recent progress in cancer immunotherapy by using nanotechnology. We hope this collection can help researchers to deepen the mechanisms how the tumor cells evade immunity, reveal how nanomedicine can do to strengthen the anti-tumor immune-response, and discuss how nanomedicine overcomes the challenges and the critical limitations of cancer immunotherapy. We also hope to offer a platform to inspire the future directions in this field.
Guest advisors
Prof. Dr. Guangya Xiang(Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
Dr. Guangya Xiang received his Ph.D. from Tongji Medical College in 2000. His research interests include nanoscale drug delivery system, drug synthetic technology and medical imaging nanotechnology. He has published more than 100 articles such as Journal of Controlled Release, Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B, Acta biomaterialia, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Chemical Engineering Journal, Bioactive Materials, Theranostics, with the H-index of 30.
Prof. Dr. Songwei Tan(Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
Dr. Songwei Tan received his Ph.D. from Zhejiang University in 2011. His research interests include polymeric drug delivery system and gene therapy. He has published more than 70 articles such as Journal of Controlled Release, Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B, Ebiomedicine, Acta biomaterialia, Nano Research, Nanoscale Horizons, with the H-index of 27.