Recent advances of anticancer nanomaterial vaccine platforms

Although cancer vaccines have been proposed for decades, their clinical outcomes have remained largely unsatisfactory. Over the past decade, progress in deciphering the interaction between the immune system and cancer, along with widespread adoption of high-throughput sequencing technologies and improved MHC-peptide binding affinity prediction, have revitalized interest in cancer vaccine development. Nanomaterials benefit from the integration of tunable composition, modular architecture, and immunologically relevant dimensions, which collectively enable the rational design of immunomodulatory strategies tailored on demand, ensuring the reliable induction of antitumor immune responses. Given the spatiotemporal nature of immune responses, multifunctional nanomaterials can be further engineered to enable multivalent antigen presentation and controlled vaccine trafficking, thereby confining antitumor immune activation to desired contexts and minimizing off-target immune-related toxicities. Beyond conventional discussions of antigen delivery, this review emphasizes how rational nanomaterial design can be leveraged to regulate multiple stages of the cancer-immunity cycle, providing an updated perspective on the development of next-generation cancer vaccines. This Review will systematically summarize recent advances in nanomaterial-based cancer vaccines and discuss the key challenges and future directions in this rapidly evolving field.