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Bacteria have been widely exploited as therapeutic agents for immunotherapy due to their native immunogenicity, living characteristic, and genetic manipulability. However, conventional bacteria-based immunotherapy often suffers from dose-dependent safety issues and poor treatment efficacy. Harnessing surface modification of bacteria to carry additional immune modulators has emerged as a promising strategy to reduce bacterial dose and synergistically enhance the activation of immune responses. In this paper, bacteria-mediated immunomodulation and the underlying mechanisms are introduced, followed by a summarization on the concept of using surface-modification approaches including physical encapsulation, chemical conjugation, and metabolic labelling to combine diverse immune functions. The applications of modified bacteria as therapeutics for immunotherapy toward cancer and inflammatory bowel disease have been expounded further. Both challenges and future perspectives regarding the utilization of surface-modified bacteria for immunomodulation are also proposed. This work offers unique insights into developing safe yet potent bacteria-based therapeutics for advanced immunotherapy.

The combination of photothermal therapy and chemotherapy are developing as a promising clinical strategy but it urgently needs the high exploration of intelligent multifunctional drug delivery nanovectors. In this paper, we used a versatile method to construct mesoporous polydopamine nanovehicles (MPDA) with the dendritic mesopores loaded with a clinical chemotherapeutic drug, Doxorubicin (MPDA@DOX). The monodisperse nanoagents are spherical with a size of ∼160 nm and pore size of approximately 10 nm. MPDA could efficiently delivery DOX with π-π stacking interaction and acts as the potent photothermal agents. Importantly, MPDA@DOX are preferentially internalized by cancerous cells, then bursting drug release and local hyperthermia generation were observed in conditions representative of the cytoplasm in tumor cells that highly synergistic cell killing effect were found under 808 nm laser irradiation. The fluorescent imaging results of human breast tumor bearing murine model evidenced that MPDA delivery platform have excellent tumor precise targeting effect and in vivo tumor ablation experiment further revealed that MPDA@DOX showed markedly eradicated tumor growth capability under laser exposure. Therefore, this work provided a fascinating strategy based on biocompatible MPDA based drug delivery system for malignant tumors eradication via synergistic therapy.