Abstract
Breast cancer is the most common type of malignancy and leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide. Despite the current revolutionary advances in the field of cancer immunotherapy, clinical response in breast cancer is frequently below expectations, in part due to various mechanisms of cancer immune escape that produce tumor variants that are resistant to treatment. Thus, a further understanding of the molecular events underlying immune evasion in breast cancer may guarantee a significant improvement in the clinical success of immunotherapy. Furthermore, nanomedicine provides a promising opportunity to enhance the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy by improving the delivery, retention and release of immunostimulatory agents in targeted cells and tumor tissues. Hence, it can be used to overcome tumor immune escape and increase tumor rejection in numerous malignancies, including breast cancer. In this review, we summarize the current status and emerging trends in nanomedicine-based strategies targeting cancer immune evasion and modulating the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, including the inhibition of immunosuppressive cells in the tumor area, the activation of dendritic cells and the stimulation of the specific antitumor T-cell response.
Highlights
This article is an open access articleBreast cancer is the most common malignancy among women worldwide, showing an incidence rate of 10.4% of all cancers
In the present review, we first describe the key mechanisms of breast cancer immune escape and, secondly, we focus on the current most relevant nanomedicine-based approaches in cancer immunotherapy to overcome immune evasion and improve conventional treatment in breast cancer
The most important mechanisms that lead to irreversible defects of human leukocyte antigen class I (HLA-I) are loss of heterozygosity (LOH) at chromosome 6 and LOH at chromosome 15 [24]; both of them have a high incidence in breast cancer [25]
Summary
Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women worldwide, showing an incidence rate of 10.4% of all cancers. Immunotherapy is one of the most promising novel strategies to treat different forms of malignancies, including breast cancer [3–5] It has provided remarkable clinical outcomes in cancer patients and has marked a milestone in the treatment of the disease [6]. This approach to eliminating cancer cells is based on boosting the intrinsic mechanisms of the immune system to recognize and destroy malignant cells and improve the antitumor immune response in patients [7]. In the present review, we first describe the key mechanisms of breast cancer immune escape and, secondly, we focus on the current most relevant nanomedicine-based approaches in cancer immunotherapy to overcome immune evasion and improve conventional treatment in breast cancer
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