Abstract
As a promising treatment option for cancer, immunotherapy can eliminate local and distant metastatic tumors and even prevent recurrence through boosting the body’s immune system. However, immunotherapy often encounters the issues of limited therapeutic efficacy and severe immune-related adverse events in clinical practices, which should be mainly due to the non-specific accumulations of immunotherapeutic agents. Activatable immunomodulatory agents that are responsive to endogenous stimuli in tumor microenvironment can afford controlled immunotherapeutic actions, while they still face certain extent of off-target activation. Since light has the advantages of noninvasiveness, simple controllability and high spatio-temporal selectivity, therapeutic agents that can be activated by light, particularly near-infrared (NIR) light with minimal phototoxicity and strong tissue penetrating ability have been programmed for cancer treatment. In this mini review, we summarize the recent progress of NIR photoactivatable immunomodulatory nanoparticles for combinational cancer immunotherapy. The rational designs, constructions and working mechanisms of NIR photoactivatable agents are first briefly introduced. The uses of immunomodulatory nanoparticles with controlled immunotherapeutic actions upon NIR photoactivation for photothermal and photodynamic combinational immunotherapy of cancer are then summarized. A conclusion and discussion of the existing challenges and further perspectives for the development and clinical translation of NIR photoactivatable immunomodulatory nanoparticles are finally given.
Highlights
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses the body’s immune system to fight cancer (Del Paggio, 2018)
Design principles and construction approaches of NIR photoactivatable immunomodulatory nanoparticles and their working mechanisms to achieve regional selectivity of immune activation are briefly summarized. The feasibility of such NIR photoactivatable immunomodulatory nanoparticles for photothermal therapy (PTT)/photodynamic therapy (PDT) combinational immunotherapy to obtain an enhanced therapeutic efficacy and biosafety is highlighted with some discussions of their potential concerns
Via the synergetic action of NIR-II PTT and immunotherapy, the growth of both primary and distant tumors and lung metastasis in a 4T1 tumor-bearing BALB/c mouse model was effectively suppressed after a single treatment
Summary
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses the body’s immune system to fight cancer (Del Paggio, 2018). Design principles and construction approaches of NIR photoactivatable immunomodulatory nanoparticles and their working mechanisms to achieve regional selectivity of immune activation are briefly summarized The feasibility of such NIR photoactivatable immunomodulatory nanoparticles for PTT/PDT combinational immunotherapy to obtain an enhanced therapeutic efficacy and biosafety is highlighted with some discussions of their potential concerns. Upon NIR laser irradiation, photothermal agents generate local heat to destroy the thermal-responsive components for controlled release of immunotherapeutic agents from nanoparticles As such, these photothermal activatable immunomodulatory nanoparticles can afford a synergetic action of PTT and immunotherapy. During PDT processes with NIR laser irradiation, 1O2 is generated by photosensitizers to initiate the cleavage of 1O2-cleavable linkers to liberate caged agents for insitu activation Such controlled activation of immunotherapeutic agents in combination with PDT will potentiate antitumor immunity
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