Developing
effective immunotherapies with low toxicity and high
tumor specificity is the ultimate goal in the battle against cancer.
Here, we reported a cell-membrane immunotherapy strategy that was
able to eliminate primary tumors and inhibited distant tumors by using
natural killer (NK) cell membrane cloaked photosensitizer 4,4′,4′′,4′′′-(porphine-5,10,15,20-tetrayl)
tetrakis (benzoic acid) (TCPP)-loaded nanoparticles (NK-NPs). The
proteomic profiling of NK cell membranes was performed through shotgun
proteomics, and we found that NK cell membranes enabled the NK-NPs
to target tumors and could induce or enhance pro-inflammatory M1-macrophages
polarization to produce antitumor immunity. The TCPP loaded in NK-NPs
could induce cancer cell death through photodynamic therapy and consequently
enhanced the antitumor immunity efficiency of the NK cell membranes.
The results confirmed that NK-NPs selectively accumulated in the tumor
and were able to eliminate primary tumor growth and produce an abscopal
effect to inhibit distant tumors. This cell-membrane immunotherapeutic
approach offers a strategy for tumor immunotherapy.
Nature has always inspired robotic designs and concepts. It is conceivable that biomimic nanorobots will soon play a prominent role in medicine. The "Terminator" in the science fiction film is a cybernetic organism with living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, which inspired us to develop natural-killer-cell-mimic nanorobots with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) characteristics (NK@AIEdots) by coating a natural kill cell membrane on an AIE-active polymeric endoskeleton, PBPTV, a highly bright NIR-II AIE-active conjugated polymer. Owing to the AIE and soft-matter characteristics of PBPTV, as-prepared NK@AIEdots maintained a superior NIR-II brightness (quantum yield ∼7.9% in water) and good biocompatibility. Besides, they can serve as a tight junction (TJ) modulator to trigger an intracellular signaling cascade, causing TJ disruption and actin cytoskeleton reorganization to form an intercellular "green channel" to help them to cross the blood−brain barrier (BBB) silently. Furthermore, they can initiatively accumulate in glioblastoma cells in the complex brain matrix for highcontrast and through-skull tumor imaging. The tumor growth was also greatly inhibited by these NK@AIEdots under the NIR light illumination. As far as we know, the quantum yield of PBPTV is the highest among the existing NIR-II luminescent conjugated polymers. Besides, the NK-cell biomimetic nanorobots showed great potential for BBB-crossing active delivery.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.