Giacobino Carla, Canta Marta, Fornaguera Cristina, Borrós Salvador, Cauda Valentina
Department of Applied Science and Technology, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy.
Grup d'Enginyeria de Materials (Gemat), Institut Químic de Sarrià (IQS), Universitat Ramon Llull (URL), Via Augusta 390, 08017 Barcelona, Spain.
Cancers (Basel). 2021 May 10;13(9):2280. doi: 10.3390/cancers13092280.
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are natural particles formed by the lipid bilayer and released from almost all cell types to the extracellular environment both under physiological conditions and in presence of a disease. EVs are involved in many biological processes including intercellular communication, acting as natural carriers in the transfer of various biomolecules such as DNA, various RNA types, proteins and different phospholipids. Thanks to their transfer and targeting abilities, they can be employed in drug and gene delivery and have been proposed for the treatment of different diseases, including cancer. Recently, the use of EVs as biological carriers has also been extended to cancer immunotherapy. This new technique of cancer treatment involves the use of EVs to transport molecules capable of triggering an immune response to damage cancer cells. Several studies have analyzed the possibility of using EVs in new cancer vaccines, which represent a particular form of immunotherapy. In the literature there are only few publications that systematically group and collectively discuss these studies. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to illustrate and give a partial reorganization to what has been produced in the literature so far. We provide basic notions on cancer immunotherapy and describe some clinical trials in which therapeutic cancer vaccines are tested. We thus focus attention on the potential of EV-based therapeutic vaccines in the treatment of cancer patients, overviewing the clinically relevant trials, completed or still in progress, which open up new perspectives in the fight against cancer.
细胞外囊泡（EVs）是由脂质双层形成的天然颗粒，在生理条件下以及疾病状态下，几乎所有细胞类型都会将其释放到细胞外环境中。EVs参与许多生物过程，包括细胞间通讯，作为各种生物分子（如DNA、各种RNA类型、蛋白质和不同磷脂）转移的天然载体。由于其转移和靶向能力，它们可用于药物和基因递送，并已被提议用于治疗包括癌症在内的不同疾病。最近，EVs作为生物载体的应用也扩展到了癌症免疫治疗。这种新的癌症治疗技术涉及使用EVs运输能够引发免疫反应以损伤癌细胞的分子。多项研究分析了在新型癌症疫苗中使用EVs的可能性，新型癌症疫苗是免疫治疗的一种特殊形式。文献中只有少数出版物对这些研究进行了系统的归类和综合讨论。因此，本综述的目的是阐述并对迄今为止文献中已有的研究进行部分梳理。我们提供了癌症免疫治疗的基本概念，并描述了一些测试治疗性癌症疫苗的临床试验。因此，我们将重点关注基于EVs的治疗性疫苗在癌症患者治疗中的潜力，概述已完成或仍在进行的临床相关试验，这些试验为抗癌斗争开辟了新的前景。
