Mesoporous Silica Materials as an Emerging Tool for Cancer Immunotherapy

Abstract

Cancer immunotherapy has emerged in the past decade as a promising strategy for treating many forms of cancer by stimulating the patient's immune system. Although immunotherapy has achieved some promising results in clinics, more efforts are required to improve the limitations of current treatments related to lack of effective and targeted cancer antigens delivery to immune cells, dose‐limiting toxicity, and immune‐mediated adverse effects, among others. In recent years, the use of nanomaterials has proven promising to enhance cancer immunotherapy efficacy and reduce side effects. Among nanomaterials, attention has been recently paid to mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) as a potential multiplatform for enhancing cancer immunotherapy by considering their unique properties, such as high porosity, and good biocompatibility, facile surface modification, and self‐adjuvanticity. This review explores the role of MSN and other nano/micro‐materials as an emerging tool to enhance cancer immunotherapy, and it comprehensively summarizes the different immunotherapeutic strategies addressed to date by using MSN.

Pore-engineered nanoarchitectonics for cancer therapy

“…Such a lipid bilayer may reduce immune clearance for therapy against cancer, improving the efficacy of as-synthesized MSNs for cancer therapy. Dong et al engineered pathogen-mimicking nanoparticles to stimulate reactive oxygen species (ROS) and immune responses in the tumor microenvironment 113 . MSNs are functionalized with amine groups and APTES and reacted with 4-carboxyphenylboronic, which has ROS-responsive properties.…”

Mesoporous silicas in materials engineering: Nanodevices for bionanotechnologies

“…The use of MSNs, in fact, for the development of cancer vaccines has been promisingly approached encapsulating biomolecules to favor their protection and to enhance the immune response, as adjuvants to boost immunostimulation, in subcutaneous or intramuscular injections or in lymph nodes targeting. Neverthless, more efforts are required to understand their interactions with the immune system [ 233 ].…”

“…With regard to biological safety, recent findings suggest that MSN do not accumulate, which accomplishes FDA regulations for getting a device into clinical use [ 233 ]. Besides, respect to the other issues, we hardly worked on the engineering process of our smart chemotherapy and, after having previously verified the high inter-batch reproducibility and the feasibility of the scaling-up process, we successfully developed an advanced MSN-based nanosystem.…”

Biomimetic virus-like mesoporous silica nanoparticles improved cellular internalization for co-delivery of antigen and agonist to enhance Tumor immunotherapy

“…Inspired by the unique morphology of viruses, several works have been carried out recently to prepare virus-like particles, including viral nanoparticles, virus-like Fe 3 O 4 /Au@C-DOX-PEG (Zhao et al., 2021 ), and TiO 2 microparticles decorated with nano-spikes (Wang et al., 2018 ). Especially, mesoporous silica nanoparticles which are easy to manufacture into a variety of shapes including a virus-like structure have attracted extensive attentions in biomedical fields as a consequence of their well-developed mesoporous structure, larger surface area, easy surface modification, stable physico-chemical properties, uniform size and good biosafety (Tang et al., 2012 ; Escriche-Navarro et al., 2022 ; Wang et al., 2022 ), and have been demonstrated as fascinating platforms for the delivery of therapeutic molecules.…”