Latest ArticlesIn recent years, immunotherapy has made great progress in clinical cancer therapy. However, the poor tumor specificity, low intra-tumoral penetration, and low cellular uptake in the systemic delivery of immunotherapeutic drugs lead to low efficacy and poor safety, limiting the development of immunotherapy. Active tumor-targeting nano drug delivery systems (aNDDS) can enhance the concentration of drugs in target cells through the interaction between surface-conjugated antibodies or ligands and the receptors on target cell membranes, providing a viable strategy for specific and efficient drug delivery. In addition, some specific types of cell membranes with the natural targeting ability have been exploited for the construction of biomimetic nanocarriers to improve the drug delivery efficiency. In view of the many advantages of active tumor-targeting nanocarriers, researchers also have designed a series of aNDDS for promoting antitumor immune responses and proved that they improved the efficacy and safety of immunotherapy. In this review, we summarize the recent progress on aNDDS for improving the tumor immunotherapy and look forward to the main challenges and future directions in this field.
As a basic amino acid, histidine has a pKa close to the acidity of the tumor microenvironment, thus the charge and solubility of histidine are able to vary as the pH changes. Under a neutral environment, histidine is not charged and exhibits hydrophobic properties, while it can be protonated and becomes hydrophilic when exposed to mildly acidic pH, such as tumor microenvironment. Therefore, histidine is widely used in the design of drug delivery systems to target the mildly acidic pH of tumor microenvironment. This article reviews the recent progresses of histidine-based tumor-targeting drug delivery systems, and summarizes the principles on promoting internalization and tuning drug release by taking advantage of histidine. Finally, we point out the common issues on histidine application and illustrate its future prospects.
Endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a multifunctional organelle in eukaryotic cells, is responsible for protein synthesis and intracellular signal transduction, which dominates cell function, survival, and apoptosis. Disequilibrium of ER homeostasis may induce ER stress, which closely intertwines with tumor occurrence and progress. A few clinical-used drugs (such as anthraquinones and oxaliplatin) can mediate the immunogenic cell death of tumor cells through excessive ER stress, and sequentially stimulate anti-tumor immune responses as well as long-term immune memory. However, these drugs often exhibit poor targeting ability and extremely low ER accumulation in tumor cells, limiting their clinical efficacy. Therefore, the researches of ER-targeted delivery of these drugs will significantly benefit the efficient and precise anti-tumor immunotherapy. In this review, we introduce the relationship between ER and tumor immunity, and summarize the ER targeting strategies for anti-tumor immunotherapy in recent years. Furthermore, we discuss the problems of existing ER targeting strategies and look into its broad prospects of application.
The development of nanotechnology has made it possible to develop safe, efficient, precise and controllable drug delivery system (DDS). Among them, organic or inorganic synthetic nanocarriers have been widely reported and used for the delivery of tumor therapeutic agents. However, some of carriers have several problems, such as easily eliminated by the body's immune system, difficult to preparation or poor safety in vivo. In recent years, with the development of biomedicine, biomimetic technology based biomembrane-mediated nanodrug delivery has organically integrated the low immunogenicity of natural biomembrane, cancer targeting, and the controllable and multifunctional of smart nanocarrier design. It will achieve a new breakthrough of nanotechnology in cancer targeted therapy. Based on the recent advances of cell membrane-derived biomimetic nanotechnology and the nanomedicine in the field of cancer therapy, this review discusses the three aspects including the experimental basis of cell membrane-derived biomimetic nanotechnology, the classification of biomimetic nanodrug delivery platforms, and the application in cancer targeted therapy. Therefore, the review will provide reference for the design of smart drug delivery system and its development in cancer targeted treatment.
Tumor microenvironment (TME) is composed of abnormal tumor vasculature, extracellular matrix components, endothelial cells, pericytes, tumor associated fibroblasts, smooth muscle cells and immune cells, which is characterized by hypoxia, acidosis and high interstitial fluid pressure. Hypoxia and acidosis within the TME trigger an adjustment of the extracellular matrix (ECM), a response from neighbor stromal cells (e.g., fibroblasts) and immune cells (lymphocytes and macrophages), inducing tumor growth, angiogenesis, and ultimately, resulting in metastasis. What's more, the components of TME including abnormal tumor vasculature, rich composition of the ECM, and abundant stroma cells impair tumoral distribution and penetration of the drugs. At the same time, this stromal microenvironment plays a vital role in creating an immunosuppressive environment.Over the past years, more and more researches focus on targeting and remolding TME to improve therapeutic effects against tumors. Herein, we reviewed current strategies developed to target and remodel TME, including modulating tumor hypoxia, tumor vasculature, tumor associated fibroblasts, extracellular matrix components, tumor associated macrophage phenotypes and dendritic cells. Also, potential problems and future directions are pointed out in this review.
Cancer is considered as one of the major diseases endangering human health in the world, it is urgent to find a safer and more efficient treatment for cancer therapy. Gene therapy with ribonucleic acid (RNA) drugs could regulate the expression of tumor related genes, and exhibit good anti-tumor therapeutic potential in preclinical and clinical trials. Based on the differences between tumor tissues and normal tissues in microenvironment signal characteristics such as pH, specific enzyme concentration or redox gradient, various microenvironment responsive nanocarriers had been studied and developed to deliver RNA drugs to tumor tissues and cells, improving the anti-tumor efficacy of RNA drugs and reducing toxic and side effects. This paper reviews the pathophysiological characteristics of tumor microenvironment and various strategies of tumor microenvironment responsive nanocarriers, in order to provide reference for the design of safe and efficient RNA drug delivery system for cancer therapy.
Natural killer (NK) cells, as an essential part of innate immunity, can directly identify and kill tumor cells after being activated by the synergistic action of surface inhibitory receptors and activated receptors. It can secrete cytokines to recruit dendritic cells (DCs), induce DCs maturation and enhance adaptive immune response. It can target cancer stem cells (CSCs) and circulating tumor cells (CTCs) to inhibit cancer metastasis. NK cells have a unique inflammatory tendency, which can respond to cytokines and chemokines released from tumor sites and migrate to tumor sites, making them occupy an important advantage in cancer targeted therapy. The research on cancer targeted therapy of NK cells as drug delivery carriers, NK cell membrane-coated biomimetic nanoparticles, and NK cell extracellular vesicles (NKEVs) has attracted more and more attention. The article will focus on the mechanism of NK cells inhibiting cancer, and summarize the research progress of cancer targeted therapy of NK cells.
Nanotechnology has shown broad application prospects in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Currently, nearly 80 cancer nanomedicines are under clinical investigation, and many have been approved with enhanced anti-tumor efficacy and decreased side effects. However, the presence of various barriers in related basic research, process control and clinical trials lead to extremely low translation rate. From the perspective of clinical commercialization, we summarized the progress, clinical status, challenges and opportunities of cancer nanomedicine, and presented a cutting-edge prospect on the rational design of nanomedicine and clinical trial strategies.
Vaccination is an effective way to reduce the morbidity and mortality of infectious diseases. As a needle-free transcutaneous immunization (NF-TCI) vaccination technology, microneedles (MNs), composed of multiple micro-needles orderly attached to a substrate, can overcome the problems of low immune efficiency, poor compliance and waste of resources that exists in the conventional vaccination by injection, thus becoming a research hotspot in biomedicine. The microneedle vaccine can directly break through the stratum corneum barrier of the skin without touching nerves and blood vessels in the dermis, and effectively delivers the vaccine to the immune cells in the skin tissue to initiate the immune response of the body, thus triggering strong humoral and cellular immune processes. Vaccine delivery via the MNs system possesses the advantages of high safety, satisfying immune effect and practical economy, and shows great prospect in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases and antineoplastic therapy. This article reviews the development background of MNs in transcutaneous immunization, the types of vaccine delivery, the factors affecting the immune effect, the problems to be solved and development direction in the future.
Exosomes are one of the most important ways of cell-to-cell communication in living lives. They are involved in major physiological and pathological processes, including drug resistance, infection propagation, cancer development and cardiovascular diseases. The biological functions of exosomes made it possess characteristics of low immunogenicity, high delivery efficiency, ability to cross multiple biological barriers and targeting capacity, which also encourage people to try to use it as a drug carrier to overcome the disadvantages of poor stability, low solubility, low bioavailability and high toxicity of some drugs. In this paper, the latest progress of exosomes in the delivery of antitumor drugs, including small chemotherapeutic drugs, biological macromolecules and nucleic acid drugs, is reviewed. In addition, the isolation, drug loading, and modification method and the application prospect of exosomes are also discussed.
No. 86 Xueyuan South Road, Haidian District, Beijing
010-62662699(Operation and Technical Support)
qkjq@cast.org.cn
Copyright © 2025 China Association for Science and Technology. All rights reserved. For all open access content, the relevant licensing terms apply.
Sponsored by the Office of the Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization of CAST, and supported by Science and Technology Review Publishing House
