Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2020 Sep 8:8:804.
doi: 10.3389/fchem.2020.00804. eCollection 2020.

Tumor Immune Microenvironments (TIMEs): Responsive Nanoplatforms for Antitumor Immunotherapy

Xueqing Sui  1 , Teng Jin  2 , Tonghui Liu  3 , Shiman Wu  4 , Yue Wu  4 , Zhongmin Tang  5 , Yan Ren  4 , Dalong Ni  6 , Zhenwei Yao  4 , Hua Zhang  1
Affiliations
Review

Tumor Immune Microenvironments (TIMEs): Responsive Nanoplatforms for Antitumor Immunotherapy

Xueqing Sui et al. Front Chem. .

Abstract

Interest in cancer immunotherapy has rapidly risen since it offers many advantages over traditional approaches, such as high efficiency and prevention of metastasis. Efforts have primarily focused on two major strategies for regulating the body's antitumor immune response mechanisms: "enhanced immunotherapy" that aims to amplify the immune activation, and "normalized immunotherapy" that corrects the defective immune mechanism in the tumor immune microenvironments (TIMEs), which returns to the normal immune trajectory. However, due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the TIMEs, and lack of visualization research on the immunotherapy process, cancer immunotherapy has not been widely used in clinical setting. Recently, through the design and modification of nanomaterials, intelligent TIME-responsive nanoplatforms were developed from which encouraging results in many aspects of immunotherapy have been achieved. In this mini review, the status of designed nanomaterials for nanoplatform-based immune regulation of TIMEs has been emphasized, particularly with respect to the aforementioned approaches. It is envisaged that future prospects will focus on a combination of multiple immunotherapies for more efficient cancer inhibition and elimination.

Keywords: cancer; enhanced immunotherapy; nanomaterials; normalized immunotherapy; tumor immune microenvironment.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Current main strategies on the fate of immunomodulators using nanotechnology with different parameters.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Future outlooks for effective immunological response harnessing TIME-responsive nanomaterial.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Ai X., Hu M., Wang Z., Lyu L., Zhang W., Li J., et al. . (2018). Enhanced cellular ablation by attenuating hypoxia status and reprogramming tumor-associated macrophages via NIR light-responsive upconversion nanocrystals. Bioconjug. Chem. 29, 928–938. 10.1021/acs.bioconjchem.8b00068 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Baronzio G., Parmar G., Ballerini M., Kiselevsky M., Cassuti V., Irina Zh S., et al. . (2013). Update on the challenges and recent advances in cancer immunotherapy. Immunotargets Ther. 2:39. 10.2147/itt.s30818 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Beatty G. L., Winograd R., Evans R. A., Long K. B., Luque S. L., Lee J. W., et al. . (2015). Exclusion of T cells from pancreatic carcinomas in mice is regulated by Ly6C(low) F4/80(+) extratumoral macrophages. Gastroenterology 149, 201–210. 10.1053/j.gastro.2015.04.010 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bertrand N., Wu J., Xu X., Kamaly N., Farokhzad O. C. (2014). Cancer nanotechnology: the impact of passive and active targeting in the era of modern cancer biology. Adv. Drug Deliv. Rev. 66, 2–25. 10.1016/j.addr.2013.11.009 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Binnewies M., Roberts E. W., Kersten K., Chan V., Fearon D. F., Merad M., et al. . (2018). Understanding the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) for effective therapy. Nat. Med. 24, 541–550. 10.1038/s41591-018-0014-x - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources