Immunotherapy is revolutionizing cancer treatment achieving durable and long-term responses in patients. However, only subsets of patients treated experience a positive outcome, due to immunotherapeutic resistance. Combinations of immunotherapeutics can overcome the drug resistance, thereby the administration of a cancer vaccine or an oncolytic virus followed by immune antibodies is under investigation.
Nevertheless, there is an unmet need for powerful, yet safe vaccines. Nanoparticles, in particular porous silicon nanoparticles, present ideal characteristics to formulate nanovaccines, as a result of their size-specific targeting to the lymphoid organs, to their intrinsic adjuvant effect, and to the possibility to simultaneously load adjuvants and antigens.
M.Sc. Pharma
According to Fontana the personalized nanovaccines described in her thesis are safe and well tolerated. The future developments of the nanovaccines will take them closer to the clinics by evaluating the feasibility of the approach with real patients tumors.
“The systems are quite easy to personalize: the core particle will be the same for all the patients, while the cell membrane wrapping will change for each patient because it will derive from parts of their tumor biopsy”, explains Fontana, from the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki.
Original article:
Fontana F., 2019.Biohybrid Cloaked Nanovaccines for Immunotherapy
Dissertationes Scholae Doctoralis Ad Sanitatem Investigandam Universitatis Helsinkiensis, 47/2019, pp.78
ISBN 987-951-51-5286-2 (Paperback), ISBN 978-951-51-5287-9 (PDF,
Doctoral defence:
M.Sc. Pharma