HSA-hijacking nanobinders built on bioresponsive prodrugs for combined cancer chemoimmunotherapy

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive subtype of breast cancer still lacking effective treatment options. Chemotherapy in combination with immunotherapy can restrict tumor progression and repolarize the tumor microenvironment towards an anti-tumor milieu, improving clinical outcome in TNBC patients. The chemotherapeutic drug paclitaxel had been shown to induce immunogenic cell death (ICD), whereas inhibitors of the indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1), whose expression is shared in immune regulatory and tumor cells, have been revealed to enhance the anti-tumor immune response. However, poor bioavailability and pharmacokinetic, off-target effects and hurdles in achieving therapeutic drug concentrations at the target tissue often limit the effectiveness of combination therapies. This work describes the development of novel biomimetic and carrier-free nanobinders (NB) loaded with both paclitaxel and the IDO1 inhibitor NLG919 in the form of bioresponsive prodrugs, and capable of hijacking human serum albumin (HSA). A fine tuning of the preparation conditions allowed to identify NB@5 as the best-performing prodrugs-based nanoformulation. Our data show that NB@5 effectively binds with HSA, demonstrating its protective role in the controlled release of drugs in vitro and suggesting that NB could exploit the protein as the endogenous vehicle for targeted delivery to the tumor site. Our study successfully demonstrates that the drugs encapsulated within the nanobinders are preferentially released under the altered redox conditions commonly found in the tumor microenvironment, thereby inducing cell death, promoting ICD, and inhibiting IDO1. This study highlights the potential of prodrugs-based nanobinders as a promising avenue for the targeted chemoimmunotherapy of TNBC.