A simple and powerful co-delivery system based on pH-responsive metal-organic frameworks for enhanced cancer immunotherapy

Tumor-associated antigens (TAAs)-loaded nanoparticles are able to be actively internalized by antigen-presenting cells (APCs) and have shown promising potential in cancer immunotherapy. However, current TAAs delivery strategy exhibits limitations of complicated synthesis process, low loading efficiency and inefficient CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocyte activation leading to unsatisfactory therapeutic effect. Thus, the construction of novel TAAs-delivery systems for enhanced cancer therapy is highly desirable. In this work, we fabricated a very simple yet powerful antigens-delivery system for cancer immunotherapy based-on pH-responsive metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with size about 30 nm. TAAs can be loaded into MOFs in the one-pot synthesis process and released with the degradation of MOFs in the acidic environment of endo/lysosome as the result of relatively labile metal-ligand bonds. The endosomolytic nanoparticles would facilitate protein antigens escape from endo/lysosome and optimal for enhancing antigen cross-presentation. Furthermore, the introduction of immunostimulatory unmethylated cytosine-phosphate-guanine oligonucleotide (CpG) through Watson−Crick base pairing would further enhance CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocyte responses. We demonstrated that the method to co-delivery antigens and immunostimulatory molecules was very simple, convenient and effective and showed no obvious toxicity both in vitro and in vivo. This method gave a high antigens-loading capacity and the maximal antigen encapsulating efficiency was about 55% (w/w). Additionally, the pH-responsive co-delivery system exerted enhanced antitumor outcome (about 100% survival) in B16-OVA melanoma cancers in vivo. Furthermore, we confirmed that this high rating of therapeutic effect was attributed to the recruitment of tumor-killing immunocyte. This work demonstrates the ability of pH-responsive, endosomolytic MOFs to induce strong cellular immune responses for cancer therapy by co-delivery of CpG ODN and antigens.