Recent advances in light-triggered cancer immunotherapy.

Light-triggered phototherapies, such as photodynamic therapy (PDT) and photothermal therapy (PTT), have shown strong therapeutic efficacy with minimal invasiveness and systemic toxicity, offering opportunities for tumor-specific therapies. Phototherapies not only induce direct tumor cell killing, but also trigger anti-tumor immune responses by releasing various immune-stimulating factors. In recent years, conventional phototherapies have been combined with cancer immunotherapy as synergistic therapeutic modalities to eradicate cancer by exploiting the innate and adaptive immunity. These combined photoimmunotherapies have demonstrated excellent therapeutic efficacy in preventing tumor recurrence and metastasis compared to phototherapy alone. This review covers recent advancements in combined photoimmunotherapy, including photoimmunotherapy (PIT), PDT-combined immunotherapy, and PTT-combined immunotherapy, along with their underlying anti-tumor immune response mechanisms. In addition, the challenges and future research directions for light-triggered cancer immunotherapy are discussed.

Target-specific near-IR induced drug release and photothermal therapy with accumulated Au/Ag hollow nanoshells on pulmonary cancer cell membranes.

Au/Ag hollow nanoshells (AuHNSs) were developed as multifunctional therapeutic agents for effective, targeted, photothermally induced drug delivery under near-infrared (NIR) light. AuHNSs were synthesized by galvanic replacement reaction. We further conjugated antibodies against the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) to the PEGylated AuHNS, followed by loading with the antitumor drug doxorubicin (AuHNS-EGFR-DOX) for lung cancer treatment. AuHNSs showed similar photothermal efficiency to gold nanorods under optimized NIR laser power. The targeting of AuHNS-EGFR-DOX was confirmed by light-scattering images of A549 cells, and doxorubicin release from the AuHNSs was evaluated under low pH and NIR-irradiated conditions. Multifunctional AuHNS-EGFR-DOX induced photothermal ablation of the targeted lung cancer cells and rapid doxorubicin release following irradiation with NIR laser. Furthermore, we evaluated the effectiveness of AuHNS-EGFR-DOX drug delivery by comparing two drug delivery methods: receptor-mediated endocytosis and cell-surface targeting. Accumulation of the AuHNS-EGFR-DOX on the cell surfaces by targeting EGFR turned out to be more effective for lung cancer treatments than uptake of AuHNS-EGFR-DOX. Taken together, our data suggest a new and optimal method of NIR-induced drug release via the accumulation of targeted AuHNS-EGFR-DOX on cancer cell membranes.