# Nano-immunotherapy: Merging immunotherapy precision with nanomaterial delivery

**Authors:** Thu Ha Ngo, Soumya Menon, Adolfo Rivero-Müller

PMC · DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.112319 · iScience · 2025-03-30

## TL;DR

This review explores combining nanotherapy and immunotherapy to improve cancer treatment by enhancing targetability and overcoming limitations in solid tumors.

## Contribution

The novelty lies in reviewing how merging nanomaterial delivery with immunotherapy can synergistically enhance cancer treatment efficacy.

## Key findings

- Nanotherapy relies on the enhanced permeability and retention effect for targetability.
- Cellular therapies like CAR-T face challenges in solid tumors due to immunosuppression.
- Combining nanotherapy and immunotherapy is a promising approach to overcome these limitations.

## Abstract

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.

Health sciences; Medicine; Medical specialty; Immunology; Oncology; Nanomaterials

## Linked entities

- **Diseases:** cancer (MONDO:0004992)

## Full-text entities

- **Diseases:** cancer (MESH:D009369)

## Full text

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## Figures

8 figures with captions in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12033950/full.md

## References

128 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12033950/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12033950