Aizong Shen

By Aizong Shen, Rui Qian, Ting Liu, Qingchuan Liu, Bin Liu and Zhangbao Wu

Vaccines have been successfully used for prophylaxis of infectious diseases for a long time and in the last decades have inspired researchers to make products with similar immunological mechanisms for cancer immunotherapy, which has been developed rapidly into clinical applications and has shown remarkable therapeutic efficacy, as exemplified by chimeric Ag receptor T cell (CAR-T cell) and immune checkpoint inhibitor-based therapies which can efficiently strengthen the body’s immune system to fight against cancer, but they are also expensive. Therefore, encouraged by recent success of cancer immunotherapy, scientists are actively developing the low-cost tumor Ag-based vaccines, which, however, usually exhibit weak immunostimulating effects and, therefore, are often formulated with nanoparticulate carriers to form a vaccine adjuvant-delivery system (VADS), which can not only enhance the efficacy but also mitigate the off-target toxicity associated with conventional anticancer vaccines. These nanoparticulate carrier-based VADSs have demonstrated multiple functions, such as targetedly triggering Ag-presenting cells, reeducating tumor-associated macrophages (TAM) to function as tumor suppressor agent, and eliciting robust cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) to kill tumor cells. This chapter introduces multifunctional VADS that have been engineered with nanoparticulate carriers, including polymeric-, lipid-, metallic-, and cell-based nanoparticles, and used as an alternative to the existent tools for cancer immunotherapy.

Part of the book: Immunization

By Bin Liu, Zhangbao Wu, Ting Liu, Rui Qian, Tingni Wu, Qingchuan Liu and Aizong Shen

Global immunization saves millions of human lives each year through using vaccines, which include whole microbe-based products and the subunit ones formulated with just the components of antigens able to stimulate immune system to establish specific immunity against diseases. Subunit vaccines show numerous advantages, such as defined components, high safety profile, and production without the use of dangerous pathogens, but also limited capacity in eliciting immunity due to the lack of other components than antigens, including the immunostimulatory elements of pathogen-associated molecular patterns which are able to activate the innate immunoreponses. Recently, nanoparticles (NPs) formulated with polymeric materials, such as poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid), viral proteins, chitosan, hyaluronic acid, and polystyrene, with some bearing intrinsic adjuvanticity, are widely employed as vaccine adjuvant-delivery systems (VADSs) and show great potential in developing subunit vaccines. Particularly, the polymeric NPs engineered with functional materials possess many features, such as targeting delivery, lysosome escape, anti-damaging protection, and ability to guide immune reactions toward a Th1 (T helper type 1) and Th2 pathway, which are crucial for establishing humoral and cellular immunity. This chapter describes polymeric NP-based VADSs designed for developing subunit vaccines able to elicit Ag-specific immunity at both systemic and mucosal levels via different vaccination routes.

Part of the book: Immunization