Injectable hybrid hydrogels enable enhanced combination chemotherapy and roused anti-tumor immunity in the synergistic treatment of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

Chemotherapy and immunotherapy have shown no significant outcome for unresectable pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Multi-drug combination therapy has become a consensus in clinical trials to explore how to arouse anti-tumor immunity and meanwhile overcome the poorly tumoricidal effect and the stroma barrier that greatly hinders drug penetration. To address this challenge, a comprehensive strategy is proposed to fully utilize both the ferroptotic vulnerability of PDAC to potently irritate anti-tumor immunity and the desmoplasia-associated focal adhesion kinase (FAK) to wholly improve the immunosuppressive microenvironment via sustained release of drugs in an injectable hydrogel for increasing drug penetration in tumor location and averting systematic toxicity. The injectable hydrogel ED-M@CS/MC is hybridized with micelles loaded with erastin that exclusively induces Ferroptosis and a FAK Inhibitor defactinib for inhibiting stroma formation, and achieves sustained release of the drugs for up to 12 days. With only a single intratumoral injection, the combination treatment with erastin and defactinib produces further anti-tumor performance both in xenograft and Kras^G12D-engineered primary PDAC mice and synergistically promotes the infiltration of CD8⁺ cytotoxic T cells and the reduction of type II macrophages. The findings may provide a novel promising strategy for the clinical treatment of PDAC.

Anti-tumor immunity; Ferroptosis; Injectable hydrogels; Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma; Tumor stroma.