2018 Volume 138 Issue 12 Pages 1443-1449
The appearance of immune checkpoint inhibitors has been a major turning point in cancer therapy. The success of immune checkpoint therapy has revolutionized the field of cancer therapy, and immunotherapy has joined the cancer treatment ranks as a pillar. To induce effective anti-tumor immune responses, it is necessary both to enhance the activity of immune cells and to block immune suppression by tumor cells. Carrier type drug delivery systems based on nanobiotechnology (nano DDS) represent a potentially useful technology for efficiently achieving both: enhancement of the activity of immune cells and blocking immune suppression. It has become clear that nano DDS can improve the practical utility of a wide variety of immune functional molecules and thus regulate drug kinetics and intracellular dynamics to improve drug efficacy and reduce side effects. We have been in the process of developing a nano DDS for the enhancement of cancer immunotherapy. A nano DDS encapsulating an agonist of a simulated interferon gene pathway greatly enhanced the activity of the agent's antitumor immune response. To block immune suppression, we successfully developed a small interfering RNA loaded into a nano DDS which regulates gene expression in immune cells. In this review, we summarize our recent efforts regarding cancer immunotherapy using nano DDS.
