Targeting the Tumor Microenvironment for a More Effective and Efficient Cancer Immunotherapy

2020 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 1973-1987
Author(s):  
Muyue Yang ◽  
Jipeng Li ◽  
Ping Gu ◽  
Xianqun Fan

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiecheng Wang ◽  
Jiakang Jin ◽  
Chao Qian ◽  
Jianan Lou ◽  
Jinti Lin ◽  
...  

AbstractAs the essential sexual hormone, estrogen and its receptor has been proved to participate in the regulation of autoimmunity diseases and anti-tumor immunity. The adjustment of tumor immunity is related to the interaction between cancer cells, immune cells and tumor microenvironment, all of which is considered as the potential target in estrogen-induced immune system regulation. However, the specific mechanism of estrogen-induced immunity is poorly understood. Typically, estrogen causes the nuclear localization of estrogen/estrogen receptor complex and alternates the transcription pattern of target genes, leading to the reprogramming of tumor cells and differentiation of immune cells. However, the estrogen-induced non-canonical signal pathway activation is also crucial to the rapid function of estrogen, such as NF-κB, MAPK-ERK, and β-catenin pathway activation, which has not been totally illuminated. So, the investigation of estrogen modulatory mechanisms in these two manners is vital for the tumor immunity and can provide the potential for endocrine hormone targeted cancer immunotherapy. Here, this review summarized the estrogen-induced canonical and non-canonical signal transduction pathway and aimed to focus on the relationship among estrogen and cancer immunity as well as immune-related tumor microenvironment regulation. Results from these preclinical researches elucidated that the estrogen-target therapy has the application prospect of cancer immunotherapy, which requires the further translational research of these treatment strategies.


Oncogene ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Lequeux ◽  
Muhammad Zaeem Noman ◽  
Malina Xiao ◽  
Kris Van Moer ◽  
Meriem Hasmim ◽  
...  

AbstractHypoxia is a key factor responsible for the failure of therapeutic response in most solid tumors and promotes the acquisition of tumor resistance to various antitumor immune effectors. Reshaping the hypoxic immune suppressive tumor microenvironment to improve cancer immunotherapy is still a relevant challenge. We investigated the impact of inhibiting HIF-1α transcriptional activity on cytotoxic immune cell infiltration into B16-F10 melanoma. We showed that tumors expressing a deleted form of HIF-1α displayed increased levels of NK and CD8+ effector T cells in the tumor microenvironment, which was associated with high levels of CCL2 and CCL5 chemokines. We showed that combining acriflavine, reported as a pharmacological agent preventing HIF-1α/HIF-1β dimerization, dramatically improved the benefit of cancer immunotherapy based on TRP-2 peptide vaccination and anti-PD-1 blocking antibody. In melanoma patients, we revealed that tumors exhibiting high CCL5 are less hypoxic, and displayed high NK, CD3+, CD4+ and CD8+ T cell markers than those having low CCL5. In addition, melanoma patients with high CCL5 in their tumors survive better than those having low CCL5. This study provides the pre-clinical proof of concept for a novel triple combination strategy including blocking HIF-1α transcription activity along vaccination and PD-1 blocking immunotherapy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaigai Wei ◽  
Huiling Zhang ◽  
Haiping Zhao ◽  
Jing Wang ◽  
Nana Wu ◽  
...  

Nanoscale ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Lin ◽  
Binbin Ding ◽  
Pan Zheng ◽  
Dong Li ◽  
Meifang Wang ◽  
...  

Cancer vaccine is to make tumor-specific antigens into vaccines, which then are injected back into the body to activate immune responses for cancer immunotherapy. Despite the high specificity and therapeutic...


2017 ◽  
Vol 108 (10) ◽  
pp. 1959-1966 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yosuke Ohno ◽  
Yujiro Toyoshima ◽  
Hideaki Yurino ◽  
Norikazu Monma ◽  
Huihui Xiang ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. eaax5032 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kuan-Wei Huang ◽  
Fu-Fei Hsu ◽  
Jiantai Timothy Qiu ◽  
Guann-Jen Chern ◽  
Yi-An Lee ◽  
...  

While immunotherapy holds great promise for combating cancer, the limited efficacy due to an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment and systemic toxicity hinder the broader application of cancer immunotherapy. Here, we report a combinatorial immunotherapy approach that uses a highly efficient and tumor-selective gene carrier to improve anticancer efficacy and circumvent the systemic toxicity. In this study, we engineered tumor-targeted lipid-dendrimer-calcium-phosphate (TT-LDCP) nanoparticles (NPs) with thymine-functionalized dendrimers that exhibit not only enhanced gene delivery capacity but also immune adjuvant properties by activating the stimulator of interferon genes (STING)–cGAS pathway. TT-LDCP NPs delivered siRNA against immune checkpoint ligand PD-L1 and immunostimulatory IL-2–encoding plasmid DNA to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), increased tumoral infiltration and activation of CD8+ T cells, augmented the efficacy of cancer vaccine immunotherapy, and suppressed HCC progression. Our work presents nanotechnology-enabled dual delivery of siRNA and plasmid DNA that selectively targets and reprograms the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment to improve cancer immunotherapy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhengguo Wu ◽  
Shang Li ◽  
Xiao Zhu

Cancer immunotherapy is a kind of therapy that can control and eliminate tumors by restarting and maintaining the tumor-immune cycle and restoring the body’s normal anti-tumor immune response. Although immunotherapy has great potential, it is currently only applicable to patients with certain types of tumors, such as melanoma, lung cancer, and cancer with high mutation load and microsatellite instability, and even in these types of tumors, immunotherapy is not effective for all patients. In order to enhance the effectiveness of tumor immunotherapy, this article reviews the research progress of tumor microenvironment immunotherapy, and studies the mechanism of stimulating and mobilizing immune system to enhance anti-tumor immunity. In this review, we focused on immunotherapy against tumor microenvironment (TME) and discussed the important research progress. TME is the environment for the survival and development of tumor cells, which is composed of cell components and non-cell components; immunotherapy for TME by stimulating or mobilizing the immune system of the body, enhancing the anti-tumor immunity. The checkpoint inhibitors can effectively block the inhibitory immunoregulation, indirectly strengthen the anti-tumor immune response and improve the effect of immunotherapy. We also found the checkpoint inhibitors have brought great changes to the treatment model of advanced tumors, but the clinical treatment results show great individual differences. Based on the close attention to the future development trend of immunotherapy, this study summarized the latest progress of immunotherapy and pointed out a new direction. To study the mechanism of stimulating and mobilizing the immune system to enhance anti-tumor immunity can provide new opportunities for cancer treatment, expand the clinical application scope and effective population of cancer immunotherapy, and improve the survival rate of cancer patients.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoqing Wang ◽  
Collin Tokheim ◽  
Binbin Wang ◽  
Shengqing Stan Gu ◽  
Qin Tang ◽  
...  

SUMMARYDespite remarkable clinical efficacies of immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) in cancer treatment, ICB benefits in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) remain limited. Through pooled in vivo CRISPR knockout (KO) screens in syngeneic TNBC mouse models, we found that inhibition of the E3 ubiquitin ligase Cop1 in cancer cells decreases the secretion of macrophage-associated chemokines, reduces tumor macrophage infiltration, and shows synergy in anti-tumor immunity with ICB. Transcriptomics, epigenomics, and proteomics analyses revealed Cop1 functions through proteasomal degradation of the C/ebpδ protein. Cop1 substrate Trib2 functions as a scaffold linking Cop1 and C/ebpδ, which leads to polyubiquitination of C/ebpδ. Cop1 inhibition stabilizes C/ebpδ to suppress the expression of macrophage chemoattractant genes. Our integrated approach implicates Cop1 as a target for improving cancer immunotherapy efficacy by regulating chemokine secretion and macrophage levels in the TNBC tumor microenvironment.HighlightsLarge-scale in vivo CRISPR screens identify new immune targets regulating the tumor microenvironmentCop1 knockout in cancer cells enhances anti-tumor immunityCop1 modulates chemokine secretion and macrophage infiltration into tumorsCop1 targets C/ebpδ degradation via Trib2 and influences ICB response


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