PD-1 inhibitor Keytruda combined with
chemotherapy for
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) has been approved for FDA, successfully representing the combination
therapy of
immunotherapy and
chemotherapy for the first time in 2020. However,
PD-L1 inhibitor Tecentriq combined with
albumin paclitaxel using the similar strategy failed to achieve the expected effect. Therefore, it is still necessary to explore new effective
immunotherapy and
chemotherapy-based combined strategies. We developed a cell membrane-derived programmed death-
ligand 1(PD-1) nanovesicle to encapsulate low-dose
gemcitabine (PD-1&GEM NVs) to study the effect on
breast cancer in vitro and in vivo. We found that engineered PD-1&GEM NVs could synergistically inhibit the proliferation of
triple-negative breast cancer, which interacted with PD-L1 in
triple-negative breast cancer to disrupt the PD-L1/PD-1 immune inhibitory axis and promoted
cancer cell apoptosis. Moreover, PD-1&GEM NVs had better
tumor targeting ability for PD-L1 highly-expressed TNBC cells, contributing to increasing the drug effectiveness and reducing toxicity. Importantly,
gemcitabine-encapsulated PD-1 NVs exerted stronger effects on promoting apoptosis of
tumor cells, increasing infiltrated CD8+ T cell activation, delaying the
tumor growth and prolonging the survival of
tumor-bearing mice than PD-1 NVs or
gemcitabine alone. Thus, our study highlighted the power of combined low-dose
gemcitabine and PD-1 in the nanovesicles as treatment to treat
triple-negative breast cancer.