Dendritic Cell Targeting Peptide-Based Nanovaccines for Enhanced Cancer Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy emerges as an effective avenue for tumor elimination and has many advantages compared with traditional surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. Tumor vaccines play an important role in cancer immunotherapy, while the application of tumor vaccines in clinical usage is limited because only limited response can be induced by primary tumor antigens. Accordingly, it is a key point to activate T-cell response with some novel tumor vaccines. Here, we applied phage display biopanning and screened a peptide (TY) that could combine with bone-marrow-derived-dendritic-cells (BMDCs) specifically and spleenic DCs. Then we developed mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN-TY/OVA/CpG), with peptide TY and OVA/CpG to target and activate DCs, respectively. Our results showed that the nanoparticles (NPs) could be specifically absorbed by DC in vitro, which enhanced the maturation and activation of DCs in vitro and in vivo. The in vitro study demonstrated the efficiency of nanoparticles in antigen uptake by BMDCs ...