Significant progress has been made in the field of cancer immunotherapy, where the goal is to activate or modulate the body’s immune response against cancer. However, current immunotherapy approaches exhibit limitations of safety and efficacy due to systemic delivery. In this context, the use of nanotechnology for the delivery of cancer vaccines and immune adjuvants presents a number of advantages such as targeted delivery to immune cells, enhanced therapeutic effect, and reduced adverse outcomes. Recently, gold nanoparticles (AuNP) have been explored as immunotherapy carriers, creating new AuNP applications that merit a critical overview. This review highlights recent advances in the development of AuNP mediated immunotherapies that harness AuNP biodistribution, optical properties and their ability to deliver macromolecules such as peptides and oligonucleotides. It has been demonstrated that the use of AuNP carriers can improve the delivery and safety of immunotherapy agents, and that AuNP immunotherapies are well suited for synergistic combination therapy with existing cancer therapies like photothermal ablation.
The theranostic potential of several nanostructures has been discussed in the context of photothermal therapies and imaging. In the last several decades, the burden of cancer has grown rapidly, making the need for new theranostic approaches vital. Lasers have emerged as promising tools in cancer treatment, especially with the advent of photothermal therapies wherein light absorbing dyes or plasmonic gold nanoparticles are used to generate heat and achieve tumor damage. Recently, photoabsorbing nanostructures have materialized that can be employed in conjunction with lasers in the near-infrared region in order to enhance both imaging and photothermal effects. The incorporation of tunable nanostructures has resulted in improved specificity in cancer treatment. Silica-cored gold nanoshells and gold nanorods currently serve as the chief plasmonic structures for photothermal therapy. Although gold nanorods and silica-cored gold nanoshells have shown promise as therapeutic agents, over the past few years new nanostructures have emerged that offer comparable and even superior theranostic properties. In the present review, several theranostic agents and their impact on the development of more effective photothermal therapies for the treatment of cancer are discussed. These agents include hollow gold nanoshells, gold gold-sulfide nanoparticles, gold nanocages, carbon and titanium nanotubes, photothermal-based nanobubbles, polymeric nanoparticles and copper-based nanocrystals.
Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are promising vehicles for cancer immunotherapy, with demonstrated efficacy in immune delivery and innate cell stimulation. Nevertheless, their potential has yet to be assessed in the in vivo application of peptide cancer vaccines. In this study, we hypothesized that the immune distribution and adjuvant qualities of AuNPs could be leveraged to facilitate delivery of the ovalbumin (OVA) peptide antigen and the CpG adjuvant and enhance their therapeutic effect in a B16-OVA tumor model. AuNP delivery of OVA (AuNP-OVA) and of CpG (AuNP-CpG) enhanced the efficacy of both agents and induced strong antigen-specific responses. In addition, we found that AuNP-OVA delivery alone, without CpG, was sufficient to promote significant antigen-specific responses, leading to subsequent anti-tumor activity and prolonged survival in both prophylactic and therapeutic in vivo tumor models. This enhanced therapeutic efficacy was likely due to the adjuvant effect of peptide coated AuNPs, as they induced inflammatory cytokine release when cultured with bone marrow dendritic cells. Overall, we demonstrate that AuNP mediated OVA peptide delivery can produce significant therapeutic benefit without the need of adjuvant, indicating that AuNPs are effective peptide vaccine carriers with the potential to permit the use of lower and safer adjuvant doses during vaccination.
The development of efficient and biocompatible non-viral vectors for gene therapy remains a great challenge, and exploiting the properties of both nanoparticle carriers and cationic polymers is an attractive approach. In this work, we have developed gold nanoparticle (AuNP) polyamidoamine (PAMAM) conjugates for use as non-viral transfection agents. AuPAMAM conjugates were prepared by crosslinking PAMAM dendrimers to carboxylic-terminated AuNPs via EDC and sulfo-NHS chemistry. EDC and sulfo-NHS have been utilized widely and in numerous applications such as amino acid coupling; however, their use in the coupling of PAMAM dendrimers to AuNPs presents new challenges to form effective and stable constructs for delivery that have not yet been examined. Enhanced colloidal stability and DNA condensation ability was established by probing two critical synthetic parameters: the reaction rate of the PAMAM crosslinking step, and the amine to carboxyl ratio. Based on this work, increasing the amine to carboxyl ratio during conjugation of PAMAM onto AuNPs yielded the optimal vector with respect to colloidal stability and transfection efficiency in vitro. AuPAMAM conjugates present attractive candidates for non-viral gene delivery due to their commercial availability, ease of fabrication and scale-up, high yield, high transfection efficiency and low cytotoxicity.
BackgroundGold–polyamidoamine (AuPAMAM) has previously been shown to successfully transfect cells with high efficiency. However, we have observed that certain cell types are more amenable to Au–PAMAM transfection than others. Here we utilized two representative cell lines—a “difficult to transfect” CT26 cell line and an “easy to transfect” SK-BR3 cell line—and attempted to determine the underlying mechanism for differential transfection in both cell types. Using a commonly established poly-cationic polymer similar to PAMAM (polyethyleneimine, or PEI), we additionally sought to quantify the relative transfection efficiencies of each vector in CT26 and SK-BR3 cells, in the hopes of elucidating any mechanistic differences that may exist between the two transfection vectors.ResultsA comparative time course analysis of green fluorescent protein reporter-gene expression and DNA uptake was conducted to quantitatively compare PEI- and AuPAMAM-mediated transfection in CT26 and SK-BR3, while flow cytometry and confocal microscopy were used to determine the contribution of cellular uptake, endosomal escape, and cytoplasmic transport to the overall gene delivery process. Results from the time course analysis and flow cytometry studies revealed that initial complex uptake and cytoplasmic trafficking to the nucleus are likely the two main factors limiting CT26 transfectability.ConclusionsThe cell type-dependent uptake and intracellular transport mechanisms impacting gene therapy remain largely unexplored and present a major hurdle in the application-specific design and efficiency of gene delivery vectors. This systematic investigation offers insights into the intracellular mechanistic processes that may account for cell-to-cell differences, as well as vector-to-vector differences, in gene transfectability.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12951-017-0271-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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