Extracellular Vesicles for Cancer Immunotherapy: Biomarkers and Beyond

Extracellular vesicles (EVs), like exosomes and microvesicles, are membrane-bound vesicles released by most cell types in response to cellular stress as well as normal physiologic conditions. EV plays a vital part in cell communication and tumor immunology. Tumor-derived EVs carry a wide range of tumor neoantigens and have a distinct molecular signature that reflects the tumor’s genomic complexities. These tumor-derived EVs provide a glance into the immunological tumor microenvironment and have a perspective to be a novel, minimally invasive cancer immunotherapy biomarker. Antibodies against immune checkpoint inhibitors like anti-programmed death-1 (PD-1) and its ligand (PD-L1) have changed the treatment of broad diversity of solid tumors such as non-small cell lung cancer, head, and neck squamous cell carcinoma, urothelial carcinoma, melanoma, etc. Invasive tissue biopsy is necessary for both histologic diagnosis and next-generation sequencing efforts. The latter has become increasingly widespread in today’s healthcare. There is an unmet need for non-invasive or minimally invasive (e.g., plasma-based) biomarkers in both diagnosis and therapy monitoring. The selected investigation of EV in biospecimens, including plasma and saliva, can achieve this goal by potentially avoiding the need for tissue samples. In this chapter, we discuss the present challenges of biomarkers in cancer immunotherapy and the mechanistic role of tumor-derived EV in regulating the anti-tumor immune response

Role of mesoporous silica nanoparticles for the drug delivery applications

The mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs), because of the synthesis, ease of surface functionalization, tunable pore size, large surface area, and biocompatibility, are being useful in many of the biomedical applications like drug delivery, theranostics, stem cell research, etc. It has been a potent nanocarrier for many different therapeutic agents, i.e., the surface functionalization of silica nanoparticles (SNs) with chemical agents, polymers, and supramolecular moieties enable the efficient delivery of therapeutic agents in a highly controlled manner. Also, the toxicity, biosafety, and in vivo efficiency involving biodistribution, pharmacokinetics, biodegradation, and excretion of MSNs play an important role in its involvement in the clinical applications. A coherence between chemistry and biological sciences extends its opportunities to a wide range in the field of nanomedicine such as smart drug delivery systems, functionalization and gating approach, controlled drug delivery systems, diagnostic and targeted theragnostic approach etc. Thus, taking advantage of the inbuilt properties of the MSNs applicable to the biomedical sector, the present review describes a panorama on the SNs which are presently used for the development of theragnostic probes and advanced drug delivery platforms