Emerging Nano-Immunotherapeutic Approaches to Glioma

Abstract

Glioma is a highly invasive and frequently occurring type of brain malignancy in the central nervous system. The prognosis is often poor for glioma patients, despite the substantial advances in diagnosis and therapeutic approaches. The breakthrough discoveries in oncoimmunology have led to innovative and efficacious immunotherapeutic strategies to treat or even cure cancer patients; however, the efficacy of immunotherapy to glioma is disappointing. The unsatisfied outcomes can be explained by local immune resistance, blood–brain barrier (BBB), spatially heterogenous and immunologically specialized glioma microenvironment, etc. The emergence of nanoengineered immunotherapeutics transforms the modalities in glioma immunotherapy under preclinical and clinical settings. Nanotechnology aids the immunotherapeutics crossing the BBB and flicks the switch of immunity locally and systematically for enhanced tumor-infiltrating effector immune cells against glioma. Herein, the advancement of knowledge in healthy brain immunology and glioma-associated local and systemic immunosuppression is summarized and highlighted. The clinical development of immunotherapeutic approaches is discussed, such as therapeutic glioma vaccines, dendritic cell vaccines, immune checkpoint blockade, adoptive cell therapy, and new immunotargets. Herein, nanotechnology-enabled glioma immunotherapy in preclinical and clinical studies is clarified and perspectives on future possibilities of advancing nanoengineered immunotherapeutics to clinical reality for glioma treatment are provided.