7B: Biomaterials for Cancer Immunotherapy

The past decade has witnessed the roaring development of immunotherapies for clinical cancer treatment. Immune checkpoint blockade therapies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies have demonstrated clinical efficacy against a variety of cancers. However, issues including limited patient responses, life-threatening off-target side effects, and poor efficacy against many solid tumors still limit the clinical utility of cancer immunotherapies. Biomaterial carriers of these therapies, though, enable one to troubleshoot the delivery issues, amplify immunomodulatory effects, integrate the synergistic effect of different molecules, and more importantly, home and manipulate immune cells in vivo. Through this “Biomaterials for Cancer Immunotherapy” symposium in 2025 SFB Annual Meeting, we aim to bring together scientists pursuing cutting edge research at the intersection of biomaterials and cancer immunotherapy. Topics of interest include but are not limited to: nanovaccine, nano-immunotherapy, biomaterial scaffold immunotherapy, adjuvanting materials, materials for immune cell engineering, immunological modeling systems, and lymphoid organoids.