Surgery maintains its strong position as a therapeutic modality for treating established solid tumors, and various immunotherapies, such as cancer vaccines and checkpoint therapies. Adoptive T cell transfer are applied to treat residual tumors after surgery and prevent tumor recurrence and metastasis. However, immunotherapies have a low response rate, which ranges from approximately 5-30% depending on the target tumor.

Recently, Prof. Yong Taik LIM’s research team from Sungkyunkwan University reported a syringeable immunomodulatory multidomain nanogel (iGel) that overcame the limitation by reprogramming the pro-tumoral tumor microenvironment (TME) to antitumoral immune niches.

Local and extended release of immunomodulatory drugs from iGel deplete immunosuppressive cells, while inducing immunogenic cell death, it increased immunogenicity. When iGel is applied as a local postsurgical treatment, both systemic antitumor immunity and a memory T cell response are generated, and the recurrence and metastasis of tumors to lungs and other organs are significantly inhibited. Reshaping of the TME using iGel also reverts non-responding groups to checkpoint blockade therapies into responding groups. The iGel is expected as an immunotherapeutic platform that can reshape immunosuppressive TMEs and synergize cancer immunotherapy with checkpoint therapies, with minimized systemic toxicity.

Thesis Title: Syringeable immunotherapeutic nanogel reshapes tumor microenvironment and prevents tumor metastasis and recurrence