Advances in Engineered Polymer Nanoparticle Tracking Platforms towards Cancer Immunotherapy—Current Status and Future Perspectives

Abstract

Engineering polymeric nanoparticles for their shape, size, surface chemistry, and functionalization using various targeting molecules has shown improved biomedical applications for nanoparticles. Polymeric nanoparticles have created tremendous therapeutic platforms, particularly applications related to chemo- and immunotherapies in cancer. Recently advancements in immunotherapies have broadened this field in immunology and biomedical engineering, where “immunoengineering” creates solutions to target translational science. In this regard, the nanoengineering field has offered the various techniques necessary to manufacture and assemble multifunctional polymeric nanomaterial systems. These include nanoparticles functionalized using antibodies, small molecule ligands, targeted peptides, proteins, and other novel agents that trigger and encourage biological systems to accept the engineered materials as immune enhancers or as vaccines to elevate therapeutic functions. Strategies to engineer polymeric nanoparticles with therapeutic and targeting molecules can provide solutions for developing immune vaccines via maintaining the receptor storage in T- and B cells. Furthermore, cancer immunotherapy using polymeric nanomaterials can serve as a gold standard approach for treating primary and metastasized tumors. The current status of the limited availability of immuno-therapeutic drugs highlights the importance of polymeric nanomaterial platforms to improve the outcomes via delivering anticancer agents at localized sites, thereby enhancing the host immune response in cancer therapy. This review mainly focuses on the potential scientific enhancements and recent developments in cancer immunotherapies by explicitly discussing the role of polymeric nanocarriers as nano-vaccines. We also briefly discuss the role of multifunctional nanomaterials for their therapeutic impacts on translational clinical applications.

Keywords

• polymer nanoparticles
• nano-vaccines
• immune cells
• immunotherapy
• tumor microenvironments
• drug delivery