Immune Cell Homing Hydrogels for Cancer Immunotherapy

Cancer immunotherapy has shifted the paradigm for clinical cancer treatment in the past decade, especially with the success of checkpoint blockades and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy. However, the low patient response rate to checkpoint blockades, poor efficacy of CAR-T cell therapy against solid tumors, and severe side effects in both have limited the utility of cancer immunotherapy. These issues motivate the development of new immunotherapies that can induce persistent cytotoxic T lymphocyte response with minimal side effects. This often requires the targeted modulation of specific types of immune cells (e.g., dendritic cells and T cells) in lymphatic tissues or cancerous tissues, which is inevitably challenging. Immune cell homing materials, though, enable in situ recruitment and modulation of immune cells for the orchestration of systemic immune responses and overall antitumor efficacy. Here we introduce the design, synthesis, characterization, and immune analysis of dendritic cell-homing macroporous hydrogels for the development of cancer immunotherapy.