Abstract
Plant virus nanoparticles (VNPs) are inexpensive to produce, safe, biodegradable and efficacious as treatments. The applications of r plant virus nanoparticles range from epitope carriers for vaccines to agents in cancer immunotherapy. Both VNPs and virus-like particles (VLPs) are highly immunogenic and are readily phagocytosed by antigen presenting cells (APCs), which in turn elicit antigen processing and display of pathogenic epitopes on their surfaces. Since the VLPs are composed of multiple copies of their respective capsid proteins, they present repetitive multivalent scaffolds which aid in antigen presentation. Therefore, the VLPs prove to be highly suitable platforms for delivery and presentation of antigenic epitopes, resulting in induction of more robust immune response compared to those of their soluble counterparts. Since the tumor microenvironment poses the challenge of self-antigen tolerance, VLPs are preferrable platforms for delivery and display of self-antigens as well as otherwise weakly immunogenic antigens. These properties, in addition to their diminutive size, enable the VLPs to deliver vaccines to the draining lymph nodes in addition to promoting APC interactions. Furthermore, many plant viral VLPs possess inherent adjuvant properties dispensing with the requirement of additional adjuvants to stimulate immune activity. Some of the highly immunogenic VLPs elicit innate immune activity, which in turn instigate adaptive immunity in tumor micro-environments. Plant viral VLPs are nontoxic, inherently stable, and capable of being mass-produced as well as being modified with antigens and drugs, therefore providing an attractive option for eliciting anti-tumor immunity. The following review explores the use of plant viruses as epitope carrying nanoparticles and as a novel tools in cancer immunotherapy.
Highlights
Nanomedicine is an emerging area of multidisciplinary research that has already shown promise of transforming into a disruptive innovative development (Farokhzad et al, 2008)
We provide a series of examples to discuss how plant virus architecture contributes to their applications in cancer diagnostics and therapy (Wen et al, 2015a; Wen et al, 2015b)
The fact that surface vimentin expression correlated with Cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV) uptake in this study demonstrated the ability of CPMV to detect invasive cancer cells
Summary
Nanomedicine is an emerging area of multidisciplinary research that has already shown promise of transforming into a disruptive innovative development (Farokhzad et al, 2008). Nanomedicines includes a wide array of nanomaterials with particle size ranging from 1nm to more than 400 nm and are a remarkably diverse group of materials (Zhang et al, 2008; Zhou et al, 2012) They may be made up of entirely of a metal as in the case of Gold and Silver nanoparticles (Paviolo and Stoddart, 2017), or a combination of liquids or a ternary system composed of an assortment of several compatible materials giving rise in most cases to a multifunctional entity often possessing stimuli responsive attributes enabling it to respond to minute changes in factors such as pH and temperature variations (Moreira et al, 2016). We discuss the architecture of plant viruses, how they came to be used as nanoparticles in various medical applications, and how they may be employed in the future as novel cancer immunotherapies (Shahgolzari et al, 2021)
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