Safe engineering of cancer-associated fibroblasts enhances checkpoint blockade immunotherapy

Abundant cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in highly fibrotic breast cancer constitute an immunosuppressive barrier for T cell activity and are closely related to the failure of immune checkpoint blockade therapy (ICB). Inspired by the similar antigen-processing capacity of CAFs to professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs), a “turning foes to friends” strategy is proposed by in situ engineering immune-suppressed CAFs into immune-activated APCs for improving response rates of ICB. To achieve safe and specific CAFs engineering in vivo, a thermochromic spatiotemporal photo-controlled gene expression nanosystem was developed by self-assembly of molten eutectic mixture, chitosan and fusion plasmid. After photoactivatable gene expression, CAFs could be engineered as APCs via co-stimulatory molecule (CD86) expression, which effectively induced activation and proliferation of antigen-specific CD8 + T cells. Meanwhile, engineered CAFs could also secrete PD-L1 trap protein in situ for ICB, avoiding potential autoimmune-like disorders caused by “off-target” effects of clinically applied PD-L1 antibody. The study demonstrated that the designed nanosystem could efficiently engineer CAFs, significantly enhance the percentages of CD8+ T cells (4-folds), result in about 85% tumor inhibition rate and 83.3% survival rate at 60 days in highly fibrotic breast cancer, further inducing long-term immune memory effects and effectively inhibiting lung metastasis.