Using biomaterials to improve immunotherapy outcomes and reduce side effects

Immunotherapy is an increasingly successful treatment strategy for many types of cancer. It involves harnessing the body’s immune cells to target and eliminate tumors and can be more precise and effective than conventional treatments. However, immunotherapies can still struggle with targeted delivery, treatment persistence, and toxic side effects that limit their applications.

Cunningham et al. discuss recent advances in the use of biomaterials to augment cancer immunotherapy treatments. These biomaterials can be used to localize drug and cell delivery, limit side effects, or directly help stimulate the immune response.

“Immunotherapies are generally given systemically, so a huge amount of drugs or cells need to be injected,” said author Sophie Lerouge. “With local delivery, we can really reach close to the tumor.”

The authors describe how biomaterials can operate as local delivery scaffolds for drugs, as immune cell growth and delivery platforms, or as antigen presentation systems to create vaccines that could protect from cancer recurrence. They list several such materials, detail how they improve the efficacy of various immunotherapies, and describe the main design criteria and challenges to overcome.

The group aims to provide a comprehensive examination of the wide variety of biomaterials being explored for use in immunotherapy. They hope that in the near future, immunotherapies involving biomaterials will grow more common in medical settings.

“It is still rare that biomaterials are used in clinical trials for cancer immunotherapy,” said author Nick Cunningham. “I think in the next decade these will move into the clinic, which will make these therapies more effective and more applicable to a broader range of patients.”

Source: “Biomaterials for enhanced immunotherapy,” by Nicholas Cunningham, Réjean Lapointe, and Sophie Lerouge, APL Bioengineering (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0125692 .