College of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Donghua University, 2999 North Renmin Road, Shanghai 201620, China
e-mail: xshi@dhu.edu.cn
Inhibiting tumor growth and preventing tumor recurrence and metastasis are still the major targets of current cancer therapy. Recent advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology provide a vast variety of options to design nanoplatforms for cancer therapy from multiple aspects. In particular, dendrimers, a family of highly branched monodispersed synthetic macromolecules have been used to deal with cancer via immunotherapy through different aspects. In this talk, I would like to show the developments of dendrimer-based nanomedicine design to boost cancer immunotherapy investigated in our group. Dendrimers can be used as gene vectors to deliver siRNA to cancer cells,[1] T cells,[2] or dendritic cells (DCs)[3] to induce immune checkpoint blockade therapy or to maturate DCs for activation of cytotoxic T cells. In addition, dendrimer-entrapped CuS nanoparticles modified with phenylboronic acid can be complexed with an adjuvant to capture antigen after photothermal therapy of tumors to create an in-situ tumor vaccine.[4] Moreover, dendrimers with intrinsic chemotherapy activity can be used as a drug to promote chemoimmunotherapy of tumors through amplification of endoplasmic reticulum stress and mitochondrial dysfunction.[5] Lastly, dendron micelles with inherent immune activity to proliferate natural killer (NK) cells can be designed to modulate multiple immune cells for cooperative tumor chemoimmunotherapy.[6]
References
[1] X. Xue, J. Li, Y. Fan, M. W. Shen, X. Y. Shi, Sci. China Mater. 2021, 64, 2045.