Emerging strategies for biomaterial-assisted cancer immunotherapy

Among many treatment options to prevent cancer progression, cancer immunotherapy has become a powerful clinical strategy due to its favorable clinical outcomes. The number of clinical trials in immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy has been remarkably increasing in recent years. However, the currently available options for these treatments pose significant challenges related to immune-related adverse effects and limited therapeutic efficacy. Excellent delivery technologies by leveraging biomaterials to mitigate these limitations could potentially advance current cancer immunotherapies for a wide range of applications. In this review, we analyze various strategies of biomaterial-assisted cancer immunotherapy for localized, targeted, and combined treatments and then summarize the promises and challenges for integrating biomaterial-based delivery technologies into cancer immunotherapy.