Advances in engineering and delivery strategies for cytokine immunotherapy.

Introduction: Cytokine immunotherapy is a growing field for the treatment of cancer, infectious disease, autoimmunity, and other ailments. Therapeutic cytokines are a class of secreted, small proteins that play a pivotal role in regulating the innate and adaptive immune system by provoking or mitigating immune responses. In the clinic, cytokines are frequently combined with other treatments, such as small molecules and monoclonal antibodies. However, the clinical translation of cytokine therapies is hindered by their short half-life, pleiotropic nature, and off-target effects, which cause diminished efficacy and severe systemic toxicity. Such toxicity limits dosage, thus resulting in suboptimal doses. Accordingly, numerous efforts have been devoted to exploring strategies to promote cytokine therapies by improving their tissue specificity and pharmacokinetics.

Areas covered: Preclinical and clinical research into bioengineering and delivery strategies for cytokines, consisting of bioconjugation, fusion proteins, nanoparticles, and scaffold-based systems.

Expert opinion: These approaches pave the way for the development of next-generation cytokine treatments with greater clinical benefit and reduced toxicity, circumventing such issues currently associated with cytokine therapy.