Nano-immunotherapy: Merging immunotherapy precision with nanomaterial delivery

In current landscape of cancer treatment, nanotherapy and cellular therapy stand out as promising and innovative approaches. Nanotherapy have excelled in delivering functional molecules effectively to target cancer cells, however the targetability is mostly the result of the enhanced permeability and retention effect. Meanwhile, cellular therapies such recently emerging chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T therapy are proficient at specifically targeting cancer cells by using engineered receptors on T cells. Yet, cellular therapies preform poor in solid tumors due to immunosuppression and cancer cell resistance to immuno-stimulation, in other words their delivery of deadly cargo is deficient. Therefore, combining nanotherapy and immunotherapy is an emerging trend, with ongoing clinical trials exploring their synergistic effects. This 2-input approach holds promise for enhancing treatment efficacy and overcoming limitations in cancer therapy. In this review, we will discuss two aspects: targetability and delivery for each individual therapy and what the combined nano-immunotherapy strategies have achieved up to now. In the last section, some future perspectives for this combination are suggested.