Abstract
The microenvironment is increasingly recognized to have key roles in cancer, and biomaterials provide a means to engineer microenvironments both in vitro and in vivo to study and manipulate cancer. In vitro cancer models using 3D matrices recapitulate key elements of the tumour microenvironment and have revealed new aspects of cancer biology. Cancer vaccines based on some of the same biomaterials have, in parallel, allowed for the engineering of durable prophylactic and therapeutic anticancer activity in preclinical studies, and some of these vaccines have moved to clinical trials. The impact of biomaterials engineering on cancer treatment is expected to further increase in importance in the years to come.
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Acknowledgements
Relevant work in the authors' laboratory has been supported in part by a grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R01 EB015498).
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D.J.M. has pending patent applications on biomaterial-based cancer vaccine systems which are reviewed in this article. L.G. declares no competing interests.
Glossary
- Adjuvants
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Substances that modify the immune responses to an antigen.
- Bolus vaccination
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Injection of vaccine components suspended in solution.
- Cellular immune responses
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Responses that involve the activation of phagocytes and antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes in response to an antigen.
- Elastic modulus
-
A measure of a substance's resistance to being deformed elastically under force, as calculated by the ratio of applied stress to the resulting strain in the substance.
- Elasticity
-
The ability of solid materials to return to their original shape after being deformed.
- Electrospinning
-
An approach to the fabrication of nano- or microscale fibres through electrostatic repulsion-induced formation of a jet of a polymer solution.
- Humoral immune responses
-
Used here to indicate responses that involve the activation of B cells to secrete antibodies to a specific antigen.
- Interpenetrating polymer network
-
(IPN). A polymer comprising two or more networks that are interlaced on a molecular scale but not covalently bonded to each other.
- Microfluidics
-
Technology that processes or manipulates small volumes of fluids using channels with dimensions of tens to hundreds of micrometres.
- Photolithography
-
The process of transferring patterns onto a substrate using light and light-sensitive chemicals.
- Pluronic copolymer
-
A block copolymer of polyethylene glycol and polypropylene glycol.
- Sacrificial templates
-
Templates fabricated using materials that can be removed later to form desired void structures inside a scaffold.
- Soft lithography
-
A technique for fabricating or replicating structures using elastomeric stamps or moulds.
- Virus-like particle
-
(VLP). A protein structure that mimics the organization of a virus but lacks the viral genome.
- Viscoelasticity
-
A property of materials that exhibit both viscous and elastic characteristics when undergoing deformation. Viscoelastic materials can flow under forces, but exhibit some elastic behaviour.
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Gu, L., Mooney, D. Biomaterials and emerging anticancer therapeutics: engineering the microenvironment. Nat Rev Cancer 16, 56–66 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc.2015.3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc.2015.3
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