Chemo-Immunotherapy through Accelerated Uptake

This PES project will highlight the proposal's potential on the radical innovativeness of the emerging cancer patient-centric chemoimmunotherapy developing platform technology for accelerated active pharma ingredient uptake. Malignant solid tumours are challenging to treat due to their poor and irregular vascularization that causes a reduction in drug penetration. Therefore, effective treatment requires more chemotherapy sessions leading to more prolonged exposure to the highly toxic drugs, producing severe side effects. Enhancing drug penetration and accelerated uptake in tumoural tissues would significantly improve treatment success rates and patients' quality of life. Evidence, growing in numbers, indicates immunotherapies are effective in multiple cancer types, and therefore, the combination of immunotherapy with other therapies appears beneficial in a broad range of tumours. Nanovehicles integrated with different treatments and loaded with multiple drugs can facilitate anti-tumour effects and modulate the tumour immune environment more efficiently than monotherapy. The choice of therapeutic agents and the timing of these combinations is critical, and therefore further computational and wet-lab experimental research is required.iNANOD AS and consortium partners have the vision to develop (an innovative platform technology derived) nanoformulations surface-grafted with two different classes of active pharmaceutical ingredients that will allow safe delivery of chemotherapeutics to cancer cells specifically within tumours. We propose to use unique molecules to improve the penetration of nanoformulations in tumours using the biological conditions within the tumour microenvironment. These nanoformulations will be actively targeted using monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for the controlled release of drugs, thus improving the efficacy and safety of the treatment. Moreover, the mAbs will enhance anti-tumour immune cell populations through antigen-specific immune responses.