The renaissance of anti‐neoplastic immunity from tumor cell demise

Abstract

Cancer therapies can temporarily reduce tumor burdens by inducing malignant cell death. However, cancer cure is still far from realization because tumors often gain resistance to current treatment and eventually relapse. Accumulating evidence suggests that successful cancer interventions require anti-tumor immunity. Therapy-induced cell stress responses ultimately result in one or more cell death modalities, including apoptosis, autophagy, necroptosis, and pyroptosis. These irreversible dying processes are accompanied by active or passive release of cell death-associated molecular patterns (CDAMPs), which can be sensed by corresponding pattern recognition receptors (PRR) on tumor-infiltrating immune cells. This crosstalk with the immune system can reawaken immune surveillance in the tumor microenvironment (TME). This review focuses on immune-modulatory properties of anti-cancer regimens and CDAMP-mediated communications between cell stress responses and the immune contexture of TME. In addition, we describe how immunogenic cell death can elicit strong and durable anti-tumor immune responses.

cGAS/STING axis mediates a topoisomerase II inhibitor–induced tumor immunogenicity

“…In this way, ICD-inducing chemotherapy drugs not only kill cancer cells, but also activate anticancer immunity that may potentiate the therapeutic efficacy of immunotherapy (22). However, all the known ICD markers do not always translate into strong in vivo antitumor immunity, and systemic evaluation of the ICD features of currently approved drugs have yielded inconsistent results due to tumor-intrinsic variation of capacities of some cellular functions such as autophagy or necroptosis (19,23,24). Currently, there are several reporter systems used for ICD inducer drug screening, such as fluorescent biosensor of CRT-GFP or HMGB1-GFP, ATP, and ELISA measurement of HMGB1 (25).…”

<p>Nanomaterial-Based Tumor Photothermal Immunotherapy</p>

“…[75][76][77][78][79] During ICD, dendritic cells (DCs) capture the released damaged-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) and tumor-associated antigens (TAAs), then processed and presented to adaptive immune cells to activate specific immune response. 76,[79][80][81] Researchers have recognized the potential benefits of PTT when it was introduced to compensate for some inherent drawbacks of immunotherapy. Nanomaterials for PTT can be further modified with immunostimulants or other immune drugs to enhance the whole body's antitumor immune responses.…”

Mining hub genes correlated with immune infiltrating level across multiple tumors microenvironment

“…A key factor for tumor cells to evade antitumor immune surveillance lies in the complex immunosuppressive microenvironment, which is formed through downregulation of tumor antigens and production of immunosuppressive mediators [1,2]. Great progress has been made in modern immunotherapy by recognizing immune checkpoint [3][4][5] and adopting tumor vaccine [6][7][8], which suggested that elucidating the antitumor immune-related mechanisms is crucial to initiate a clinically meaningful antitumor immune response.…”