- Cancer causes 10 million deaths annually globally and maintains an increasing trend.
- The device is designed to be a long-term platform that can be refilled with minimal invasiveness to provide continuous immune activation.
- It is also biocompatible, mechanically stable, and minimally invasive, making it ideal for future clinical applications.
Technology has been instrumental in achieving the increase in global life expectancy. The development of drugs has been useful to deal with a wide range of diseases and conditions, but there is still a pending issue and that is the cancer vaccine. Research has been underway for decades and the first advance that could offer an accurate solution was finally achieved.
In the first instance, tumors are associated with the rapid multiplication of abnormal cells that spread beyond their normal limits and can invade adjacent parts of the body. This process is called “metastasis” and is the leading cause of death from cancer.
First implantable device that works like a cancer vaccine
For its part, the new innovation is called NanoLymph and consists of a implantable device that works like a vaccine against cancer. It can locally recruit and activate antitumor immune cells to elicit a response.
The immunotherapy against cancer has revolutionized the treatment of this disease but many patients do not respond and the approach has limited success in most solid tumors.
Resistance to immunotherapy can also cause cancer to relapse. PTherefore, there is a critical need to increase the response rate to cancer immunotherapy for all types of malignancies and in all patient populations. And this is where cancer vaccines can play a crucial role.
By increasing immunogenicity while maintaining specificity, the implantable device could be a more effective approach to kill tumors and evade tumor-induced immune suppression.
To be effective, the cancer vaccines they must be able to identify tumor cells without inducing autoimmunity and must generate generalized antitumor immunity without systemic toxicity.
The strategies of Dendritic cell-targeted cancer vaccines (DC), powerful antigen-presenting cells, have been minimally effective. While ex vivo strategies are prone to immunological rejection and low tissue uptake with the difficulty of achieving compliance with the protocols by the patient.
An alternative to previous approaches are biomaterial-based cancer vaccines, which have been shown to generate antigen-specific responses that drive the cancer immunity cascade. Several of these systems have been developed, but they are limited to a single administration and cannot be tailored as needed for the patient’s ongoing response to therapy.
Directed by Dr. Alessandro Grattoni, Professor of Nanomedicine at the Houston Methodist Hospitaldeveloped an implantable cancer vaccine device called “NanoLymph.”
How does it work?
The device would be implanted under the skin and consists of a double reservoir where stimulants and antigens that generate immunity are placed. After the skin where the device was cut open has healed and the patient’s body has accepted the device as part of their body, specialists then insert immunostimulants and encapsulated antigen into the device through the skin to begin to act out.
After this happens, the dendritic cells begin their actions and head towards the same lymph nodes that will begin to generate an anti-tumor T cell immune response.
Unlike other approaches to cancer vaccinesNanoLymph is designed to be a long-term platform that can be refilled with minimal invasiveness to provide continuous immune activation that can be tailored based on the patient’s ongoing response to therapy.
Sustained and continuous elution of drugs and antigens allows NanoLymph generate an enriched local microenvironment that leads to DC localization, activation, and cross-presentation to T cells throughout the lymphatic system. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate that it is biocompatible, mechanically stable, and minimally invasive, making it ideal for future clinical applications.
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