ABSTRACT
Immunotherapy has emerged as one of the major modalities for clinical cancer therapy, along with surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and targeted therapy. However, tumor-targeted delivery of immune therapeutics is challenged by a series of barriers including non-specific release, poor tumor penetration capacity, and insufficient cellular uptake of the therapeutic regimens, which seriously restricted the efficiency and efficacy of immunotherapy. To address above challenges, nanosized drug delivery systems (NDDS) have been extensively exploited to achieve tumor-targeted delivery of immunotherapy drugs. It has been well investigated that solid tumors are of unique characteristics including acidic, hypoxic and enzymatic extracellular microenvironment. Meanwhile, the tumor cells are of acidic, reductant and reactive oxygen species intracellular microenvironment. In recent years, a large variety of tumor microenvironment-activatable NDDS have been exploited to respond specifically to the stimulus of extracellular or intracellular tumor microenvironment for enhancing the accumulation, retention and penetration in the tumor tissue. These NDDS were also employed to promote intracellular uptake and tunable drug release inside the tumor cells. In this review article, we summarized the recent progress of our laboratory using the tumor microenvironment-activatable NDDS for immune efficient therapeutics delivery, and improved cancer immunotherapy. We also briefly discussed the challenges and provided perspective of NDDS-based cancer immunotherapy.