Prostate cancer presents significant clinical challenges due to difficulties in early detection, tumor heterogeneity, therapeutic resistance, and metastatic progression. A comprehensive review published in the International Journal of Nanomedicine examines how engineered multimodal nanomaterials offer promising solutions for prostate cancer theranostics. These nanomaterial platforms integrate multiple functionalities including molecular imaging, biomarker detection, targeted drug delivery, and multimodal therapeutic approaches, while simultaneously enabling therapeutic response assessment. By combining diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities within single nanostructures, these materials address critical gaps in current prostate cancer management. The review, authored by Wang and colleagues from institutions across China including Kunming Medical University and Southern Medical University, synthesizes recent advances in major nanomaterial platforms for prostate cancer applications. This multimodal approach represents a significant advancement in precision oncology, potentially improving early detection rates, personalizing treatment strategies, and monitoring treatment efficacy in prostate cancer patients, ultimately enhancing clinical outcomes and patient care quality.

Chronic inflammation drives numerous diseases including inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis, typically managed through NSAIDs, corticosteroids, and DMARDs. However, conventional drug delivery methods suffer from poor site specificity, rapid systemic clearance, variable plasma levels, and frequent dosing requirements. Thermosensitive hydrogels represent a promising alternative, utilizing stimuli-responsive biomaterials that undergo reversible sol-to-gel transformation at physiological temperature. These injectable systems enable localized, sustained drug release at targeted sites with minimal invasiveness and improved patient compliance. Advances have yielded natural polymer-based, synthetic, and hybrid formulations using materials such as poloxamers, poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), chitosan, methylcellulose, and poly(ethylene glycol)-based copolymers, demonstrating efficacy across topical, intra-articular, ocular, transdermal, and injectable routes. These materials offer tunable gelation temperatures, biodegradability, and customizable mechanical properties. Despite encouraging preclinical results, significant barriers to clinical translation persist, including mechanical instability, premature drug release, limited hydrophobic drug loading capacity, and sterilization and scalability challenges.

In situ cancer vaccination, or intratumoral immunotherapy, represents an innovative approach that transforms tumors into endogenous vaccine platforms by leveraging their complete antigenic repertoire, including tumor-associated antigens, neoantigens, and post-translationally modified epitopes. Unlike conventional vaccines requiring predefined targets and complex manufacturing, this strategy elicits robust polyclonal cytotoxic T-cell responses and facilitates epitope spreading, thereby reducing immune escape. The therapeutic mechanism involves coordinated activation of multiple immune pathways, including immunogenic apoptosis, pyroptosis, necroptosis, and ferroptosis, which release tumor antigens and danger-associated molecular patterns that promote dendritic-cell activation and durable T-cell responses. Potent adjuvants and advanced delivery platforms enhance this immunological crosstalk while remodeling the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. However, clinical translation faces challenges including inconsistent induction of immunogenic cell death, suboptimal intratumoral therapeutic retention, and T-cell infiltration barriers. Recent advances in nanomedicine-enabled delivery systems and combinatorial strategies with immune checkpoint blockade are overcoming these obstacles, positioning in situ vaccination as a broadly applicable, patient-tailored immunotherapy capable of generating durable systemic antitumor immunity.

Stimuli-responsive nanocarriers represent a significant advancement in targeted drug delivery, addressing critical limitations of conventional pharmacotherapy. Traditional drug delivery systems suffer from non-specific tissue distribution, rapid blood clearance, and systemic toxicity—particularly problematic in cancer chemotherapy where toxic compounds damage both malignant and healthy cells. Recent research focuses on designing advanced drug delivery systems that enable precise, controlled drug release in response to specific stimuli, overcoming these challenges. Nanotechnology has accelerated progress in this field, producing nanocarriers in the nanometer to hundred-nanometer scale that offer substantial advantages including extended circulation periods, increased surface area, enhanced drug loading capacity, and improved interaction with disease microenvironments. These properties enable nanocarriers to exploit unique characteristics of tumor microenvironments distinct from normal tissues, facilitating targeted accumulation and release. This approach promises to enhance therapeutic efficacy while minimizing off-target effects and improving patient compliance, making stimuli-responsive nanocarriers particularly valuable for oncology applications.

This open-access review article, published in August 2026 in Pharmaceutical Research, examines stimulus-responsive polymeric carriers designed for gene delivery applications. The research addresses a critical challenge in therapeutic nucleic acid delivery: balancing effective endosomal escape with controlled nucleic acid release. Stimulus-responsive polymers represent an advanced approach to gene therapy, as they can dynamically respond to physiological or external triggers such as pH changes, temperature fluctuations, or redox conditions within cellular environments. These polymeric systems enable nucleic acids to bypass cellular barriers while ensuring precise release of genetic cargo at target sites. The article comprehensively reviews current stimulus-responsive polymer technologies, their mechanisms of action, and their efficacy in gene delivery systems. By analyzing the delicate equilibrium between endosomal escape capabilities and nucleic acid release kinetics, this review provides valuable insights for developing next-generation gene delivery vehicles with improved therapeutic potential and reduced off-target effects.

Tumor heterogeneity represents a fundamental cancer hallmark driving progression, metastasis, and therapeutic resistance through genomic instability, clonal evolution, and cancer stem cell plasticity amplified by microenvironmental interactions. While conventional therapies eliminate certain tumor populations, resistant subclones frequently cause disease relapse. Advanced techniques including single-cell multi-omics, spatial transcriptomics, and liquid biopsy now enable comprehensive analysis of tumor heterogeneity across molecular, cellular, spatial, and temporal dimensions, revealing real-time evolutionary dynamics. This review synthesizes current understanding of tumor heterogeneity's origins and mechanisms, from cellular sources to microenvironmental manifestations and treatment resistance causes. It examines emerging therapeutic paradigms targeting clonal cooperative networks, modulating epigenetic plasticity, and reprogramming metabolic adaptations. The article emphasizes precision medicine advancement through integrated multi-omics data and dynamic monitoring technologies, advocating reconceptualization of cancer as an evolving ecosystem rather than static cells. Understanding the full extent of genetic, epigenetic, and transcriptional variation within and between tumors is essential for developing effective strategies to overcome heterogeneity-driven therapeutic challenges.

This open-access review examines cutting-edge biotechnological approaches for treating diabetic foot ulcers through biomaterial-based strategies. Published in August 2026 in Biotechnology for Sustainable Materials, the article synthesizes current research on drug delivery systems designed to enhance angiogenesis and tissue regeneration in diabetic wound healing. Diabetic foot ulcers represent a significant clinical challenge, often leading to severe complications and amputation when inadequately managed. The review explores how advanced biomaterials serve as platforms for controlled drug delivery, promoting new blood vessel formation and accelerating tissue repair processes. By integrating sophisticated delivery mechanisms with regenerative medicine principles, these approaches offer promising therapeutic potential to improve healing outcomes. The article's comprehensive analysis of biomaterial-based interventions addresses a critical gap in current diabetic ulcer treatment options, highlighting how nanotechnology and engineered scaffold systems can optimize therapeutic efficacy. This research is essential for healthcare professionals and biotechnology researchers seeking innovative solutions to reduce morbidity and improve quality of life for patients suffering from this prevalent diabetes-related complication.

Hepatotropic nanomedicine represents a promising approach to address the growing burden of liver diseases, including cirrhosis, fibrosis, viral hepatitis, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Conventional drug delivery systems frequently fail due to low bioavailability, poor water solubility, and hepatic metabolism limitations. This comprehensive review, published in the International Journal of Nanomedicine by researchers from Shuyang Benevolent Hospital, examines various liver-targeted nanocarrier systems designed to overcome these challenges. The review encompasses polymeric, lipid, inorganic, biomimetic, and nucleic acid-based platforms that employ both passive and active targeting strategies. These systems leverage the liver's unique properties, including its cellular diversity, fenestrated sinusoidal endothelium, and receptor-mediated uptake mechanisms, while also exploiting tumor microenvironment characteristics such as acidity and oxidative stress. The article addresses targeted delivery to hepatocytes, Kupffer cells, hepatic stellate cells, and HCC cells, offering tailored therapeutic solutions for specific liver pathologies and addressing the significant global health burden of liver disease.

Pancreatic cancer remains one of the most aggressive and lethal malignancies with significantly poor prognosis, necessitating innovative diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. This review, published in the International Journal of Nanomedicine by researchers at the Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, examines tumor microenvironment-responsive nanoparticles as a promising strategy for pancreatic cancer management. The pancreatic cancer tumor microenvironment exhibits distinctive hostile characteristics including elevated interstitial fluid pressure, abnormal vasculature, hypoxia, acidosis, and excessive reactive oxygen species production—all factors that promote tumor progression while suppressing immune responses and compromising treatment efficacy. The authors analyze how nanoparticle-based platforms can be engineered to transform these microenvironmental features, enhancing both diagnostic imaging capabilities and targeted drug delivery. By comprehensively reviewing TME-transforming nanoparticle designs and their performance outcomes, the study identifies clinical translation barriers requiring resolution. This research underscores the therapeutic potential of microenvironment-responsive nanotechnology in enabling early pancreatic cancer detection and facilitating personalized treatment strategies, offering important insights for advancing clinical outcomes in this devastating disease.

Ultrasound-mediated immunotherapy has emerged as a promising non-invasive approach for cancer treatment due to its deep tissue penetration and precise spatiotemporal control. Ultrasound induces immunogenic cell death through mechanical, cavitation, and sonodynamic effects, triggering the release of tumor antigens and danger-associated molecular patterns that activate both innate and adaptive immune responses. However, ultrasound therapy alone demonstrates limited immune-activating capacity. Recent advances in nanomedicine, particularly through sonosensitizers and piezoelectric ultrasound-responsive nanoplatforms, have significantly enhanced this approach by amplifying reactive oxygen species production, enabling targeted drug delivery, and remodeling the tumor immune microenvironment. The field is progressively advancing from localized tumor destruction toward systemic immune activation, particularly through combination with immunotherapy strategies targeting PD-1, PD-L1, and CTLA-4. While checkpoint inhibitors and CAR-T cell therapies have revolutionized cancer treatment for hematologic malignancies, solid tumors remain challenging due to their complex biology and immunosuppressive characteristics. Ultrasound immunotherapy, enhanced by nanomedicine innovations, addresses these limitations and offers new opportunities for precision immunotherapy in solid tumors, though clinical translation challenges remain.

Melanoma presents significant clinical challenges due to its heterogeneity, early metastatic potential, and development of treatment resistance. While conventional tissue biopsy and imaging remain diagnostic cornerstones, they suffer from invasiveness, sampling bias, and inability to monitor disease evolution longitudinally. This review examines small extracellular vesicles and exosomes—endogenous bio-nanomaterials circulating stably in body fluids—as promising alternatives for minimally invasive liquid biopsy and real-time disease monitoring. Exosomes carry multi-omic cargo including DNA, RNA, proteins, and lipids that reflect tumor-immune dynamics. Beyond diagnostic applications, engineered exosomal nanomaterials can be functionalized and loaded with therapeutic payloads to enhance targeted delivery and support combination immunotherapy regimens. The review synthesizes mechanistic roles of exosomes in melanoma progression and highlights key liquid-biopsy biomarkers such as exosomal PD-L1 and EV-miRNA/protein signatures. However, significant translational barriers remain, including standardization, scalable manufacturing, safety assessment, and robust clinical validation required to integrate these technologies into clinical practice for improved patient stratification and disease monitoring.

# Summary This open-access review article, published in July 2026, examines next-generation nanocarriers designed to deliver synergistic chemoimmunotherapy while engineering the tumor microenvironment for enhanced precision cancer treatment. The article synthesizes current research on how advanced nanoparticle-based delivery systems can simultaneously administer chemotherapy and immunotherapy agents, overcoming traditional limitations of conventional treatments. By targeting and modulating the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, these nanocarriers enable improved drug accumulation at tumor sites while reducing systemic toxicity. The approach represents a significant advancement in personalized oncology, combining nanotechnology with immunological principles to achieve superior therapeutic outcomes. This research matters because it addresses critical challenges in cancer treatment, including poor drug bioavailability, off-target effects, and immune evasion. The integration of chemotherapy and immunotherapy through engineered nanocarriers offers promising potential to improve patient response rates and survival outcomes across multiple cancer types, positioning this technology as a cornerstone of future precision medicine strategies in oncology.

Exosomes, naturally occurring extracellular vesicles, are emerging as promising biological carriers for cancer therapy, offering inherent biocompatibility and the ability to overcome biological barriers that limit traditional treatments. According to GLOBOCAN 2022 data highlighting 19.3 million new cancer cases globally, there is urgent need for more effective therapeutic approaches. This review published in the International Journal of Nanomedicine by researchers at Jilin University examines engineered exosomes, hybrid exosomes, and exosome mimics as delivery platforms for multiple cancer treatment modalities including chemotherapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy, and theranostics. While native exosomes face limitations such as low production yields, heterogeneity, and poor drug-loading efficiency, engineered variants and biomimetic platforms can preserve biological functionality while improving scalability and reproducibility. However, significant obstacles remain for clinical translation, including manufacturing standardization, cargo reproducibility, safety evaluation, and regulatory approval. This translational perspective addresses critical engineering aspects essential for transitioning exosome-inspired nanocarriers from laboratory development to clinical application in cancer treatment.

This review examines nanosystem-mediated phototherapy approaches combining photodynamic therapy (PDT), photothermal therapy (PTT), and chemodynamic therapy (CDT) to overcome tumor treatment limitations. CDT generates hydroxyl radicals through Fenton reactions but faces constraints from the tumor microenvironment, including insufficient hydrogen peroxide, suboptimal pH, robust glutathione-mediated reactive oxygen species scavenging, and hypoxia. PDT and PTT serve as synergistic modalities that enhance oxidative stress and accelerate Fenton reaction kinetics, respectively. Rather than merely cataloguing nanomaterials, this analysis constructs a mechanistic framework detailing how PDT and PTT complement CDT through reaction kinetics modulation, substrate replenishment, and antioxidant defense inhibition. The review systematically covers synergistic principles including ROS cascade amplification, glutathione depletion-initiated ferroptosis, tumor microenvironment acidification, extracellular matrix degradation, and immunogenic cell death. It summarizes advances in dual and triple-modal nanoplatforms, highlighting evolution from basic thermochemical designs to sophisticated architectures featuring tumor microenvironment-responsive delivery, second near-infrared deep-tissue penetration, enzyme-cascaded self-substrate supply, and theranostic integration, while addressing clinical translation challenges.

Fibrosis, as a shared hallmark, is prevalent in a variety of chronic diseases. However, current pharmacological strategies for fibrosis are limited in clinical application and efficacy due to issues such as insufficient targeting capability, systemic toxicity, and low bioavailability. The advent of nanotechnology has ushered in an era of novel therapeutic strategies for fibrosis, revolutionizing the treatment landscape. This article systematically reviews the dual applications of nanomaterials in fibrosis treatment: first, as nanoparticle drug delivery systems (NDDS) to enhance targeting, control release, and improve drug bioavailability; second, as therapeutic agents directly alleviating the onset and progression of fibrosis. Furthermore, this article further discusses the applications of nanomaterials with diverse designs and compositions in fibrosis affecting different organs.

T cell engagers (TCEs) represent a promising immunotherapy approach, with eight molecules currently FDA-approved for hematologic malignancies and two for solid tumors. These bispecific agents redirect endogenous T cells to attack cancer cells by simultaneously engaging tumor-associated antigens and CD3 on T cells. However, TCE efficacy in solid tumors remains limited, necessitating next-generation strategies to maintain T cell fitness within the hostile tumor microenvironment. This mini-review from Amgen researchers proposes that cellular metabolism is a critical but underexplored regulator of TCE responses. The authors examine how three major T cell signaling axes—the T cell receptor complex, costimulatory receptors, and cytokine receptors—drive metabolic reprogramming that enables immune function and influences T cell fate. The paper further explores how environmental factors such as nutrient availability and metabolic stressors within the tumor microenvironment impair TCE efficacy. By integrating understanding of immunological signaling, cellular metabolism, and immune programming, researchers can design more effective next-generation TCEs capable of overcoming metabolic barriers to anti-tumor immunity in solid tumors.

Researchers have developed a novel immunotherapy approach that reprograms macrophages to combat cancer by decorating cancer cell membranes with bacteria-derived pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) formulated into nanoparticles. These PAMP nanoparticles trigger macrophages to shift from an immunosuppressive to an inflammatory phenotype, significantly increasing phagocytosis of cancer cells and stimulating production of inflammatory cytokines including interleukin-6 and tumor necrosis factor-α. Transcriptomic analysis revealed that macrophages responding to PAMP-decorated cancer cells activate signaling pathways similar to their response against bacteria. In mouse tumor models, locally injected PAMP nanoparticles suppressed tumor growth, with enhanced therapeutic efficacy when combined with the chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin. Both PAMP nanoparticle monotherapy and the combination approach demonstrated significantly increased median survival with complete remission cases compared to doxorubicin alone. This research offers promising insights into leveraging macrophages as an effective cell-based cancer immunotherapy platform, potentially addressing limitations of existing adoptive cell therapies in treating solid tumors.

Researchers have developed a novel therapeutic approach combining bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell-derived exosome-liposome hybrid nanoparticles that simultaneously target CSF1R and PD-L1 pathways to enhance tumor-associated macrophage phagocytosis. This study, published in Cancer Nanotechnology in July 2026, demonstrates that the dual-targeting strategy effectively reprograms the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment by inhibiting colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor signaling while blocking programmed death ligand 1 checkpoint interactions. The hybrid delivery system leverages the biocompatibility and immunomodulatory properties of BM-MSC-derived exosomes combined with liposomal formulation to improve drug efficacy and cellular uptake. In vitro experiments revealed that this combinational approach significantly augments macrophage-mediated tumor cell phagocytosis in a microenvironment-dependent manner, suggesting context-specific therapeutic responses. This research highlights the potential of engineered nanoparticle systems to overcome tumor immunosuppression through multi-target engagement, offering promising implications for developing more effective immunotherapeutic strategies against cancer while potentially reducing systemic toxicity through targeted nano-delivery mechanisms.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane-enclosed nanoparticles that mediate intercellular communication by transferring proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids. This review explores recent advances in engineering EVs as programmable immune interfaces for therapeutic applications. Rather than serving merely as delivery vehicles, engineered EVs integrate antigen specificity, target-cell recognition, therapeutic cargo, and immunostimulatory or tolerogenic signals within a single nanoscale particle. The article examines modular engineering strategies including surface display, cellular targeting, and cargo loading approaches, with applications spanning cancer immunotherapy, immune suppression, and antigen-specific tolerance induction. Key platforms discussed include antigen-presenting EVs, cytotoxic and RNA-loaded EVs, checkpoint-modulatory EVs, and mesenchymal stem cell-derived EVs for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. The review emphasizes clinical translation challenges encompassing manufacturing, characterization, potency assays, biodistribution, safety, and regulatory requirements. The authors conclude that programmable EV immune interfaces represent a versatile foundation for next-generation cancer immunotherapy and context-dependent immune regulation, offering significant therapeutic potential for diverse clinical indications.

Researchers have developed a novel positron emission tomography (PET) imaging system to monitor gene expression in the brain, addressing a significant gap in neurological research tools. The team engineered a fluorine-18-labeled HaloTag ligand designed to penetrate the blood-brain barrier and form covalent bonds with HaloTag protein expressed in target cells. This exogenous reporter system overcomes limitations of existing approaches that rely on endogenous brain receptors with unpredictable expression in disease states. The tracer demonstrated specific binding in human cells expressing HaloTag and successfully enabled non-invasive imaging of viral gene transfer to striatal neurons in mice, with clear detection of reporter-expressing tissue and rapid clearance from surrounding regions. Optical imaging confirmed viral distribution, and a transgenic model expressing HaloTag fused to a postsynaptic protein validated detection of physiologically expressed intraneuronal targets. This modular platform establishes a valuable tool for preclinical neurological disease modeling and quantifying gene expression in living brains, with potential applications for monitoring gene therapy efficacy in clinical settings—a capability previously unavailable for neurological applications despite widespread use in oncology.