Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, 02215, USA.
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, 02215, USA.
J Mater Chem B. 2023 Nov 29;11(46):10982-11005. doi: 10.1039/d3tb01677c.
Immunomodulation is a powerful therapeutic approach that harnesses the body's own immune system and reprograms it to treat diseases, such as cancer. Innate immunity is key in mobilizing the rest of the immune system to respond to disease and is thus an attractive target for immunomodulation. Biomaterials have widely been employed as vehicles to deliver immunomodulatory therapeutic cargo to immune cells and raise robust antitumor immunity. However, it is key to consider the design of biomaterial chemical and physical structure, as it has direct impacts on innate immune activation and antigen presentation to stimulate downstream adaptive immunity. Herein, we highlight the widespread importance of structure-driven biomaterial design for the delivery of immunomodulatory cargo to innate immune cells. The incorporation of precise structural elements can be harnessed to improve delivery kinetics, uptake, and the targeting of biomaterials into innate immune cells, and enhance immune activation against cancer through temporal and spatial processing of cargo to overcome the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Structural design of immunomodulatory biomaterials will profoundly improve the efficacy of current cancer immunotherapies by maximizing the impact of the innate immune system and thus has far-reaching translational potential against other diseases.
免疫调节是一种强大的治疗方法，它利用人体自身的免疫系统并对其进行重新编程以治疗疾病，如癌症。先天免疫在调动免疫系统的其他部分对疾病做出反应方面起着关键作用，因此是免疫调节的一个有吸引力的靶点。生物材料已被广泛用作向免疫细胞传递免疫调节治疗性货物并提高强大的抗肿瘤免疫的载体。然而，关键是要考虑生物材料化学和物理结构的设计，因为它直接影响先天免疫的激活和抗原呈递，从而刺激下游适应性免疫。本文强调了结构驱动的生物材料设计在向先天免疫细胞传递免疫调节货物方面的广泛重要性。通过利用精确的结构元素，可以改善货物的输送动力学、摄取以及生物材料进入先天免疫细胞的靶向性，并通过对货物进行时间和空间处理来增强对癌症的免疫激活，以克服免疫抑制性肿瘤微环境。免疫调节生物材料的结构设计将通过最大限度地提高先天免疫系统的影响，从而显著提高当前癌症免疫疗法的疗效，因此具有针对其他疾病的深远转化潜力。
