Amplifying antitumor T cell immunity with versatile drug delivery systems for personalized cancer immunotherapy

Abstract

Cancer immunotherapy is becoming an important option for treating patients with cancer in clinic. Given the heterogeneity of tumors between individuals, personalized cancer immunotherapy is the most promising one. Tremendous progresses have been achieved to initialize personalized immunity in patients through delivering tumor-derived neoantigens or adoptive transfer of engineered immune cells such as T cells and nature killer cells. However, the objective response rate and therapeutic efficiency of most personalized immunotherapies are hampered by the biophysical barriers against drug delivery and the limited infiltration of engineered cells into solid tumors. To overcome these limitations, versatile drug delivery systems have been developed to deliver personalized tumor antigens to target and promote intratumoral infiltration of lymphocytes, thus generating a local immunogenic niche to induce potent and durable antitumor immune responses. In this review, we will summarize the major barriers for efficient personalized immunization, highlight our lab and several other groups’ efforts in versatile drug delivery systems for delivering tumor-specific antigens, autologous tumor cell-derived antigens and combining with adoptive transfer of engineered immune cells. At the end of this review, we also look forward to the future development of drug delivery system-based personalized immunotherapy and its challenges for clinical translation.

Keywords

• Drug delivery systems
• Personalized immunotherapy
• Nanoparticles
• Vaccines
• Adoptive cell transfer therapy