Mannosylated STING Agonist Drugamers for Dendritic Cell-Mediated Cancer Immunotherapy

The Stimulator of Interferon Genes (STING) pathway is a promising target for cancer immunotherapy. Despite recent advances, therapies targeting the STING pathway are often limited by routes of administration, suboptimal STING activation, or off-target toxicity. Here, we report a dendritic cell (DC)-targeted polymeric prodrug platform (polySTING) that is designed to optimize intracellular delivery of a diamidobenzimidazole (diABZI) small-molecule STING agonist while minimizing off-target toxicity after parenteral administration. PolySTING incorporates mannose targeting ligands as a comonomer, which facilitates its uptake in CD206(+)/mannose receptor(+) professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs) in the tumor microenvironment (TME). The STING agonist is conjugated through a cathepsin B-cleavable valine-alanine (VA) linker for selective intracellular drug release after receptor-mediated endocytosis. When administered intravenously in tumor-bearing mice, polySTING selectively targeted CD206(+)/mannose receptor(+) APCs in the TME, resulting in increased cross-presenting CD8(+) DCs, infiltrating CD8(+) T cells in the TME as well as maturation across multiple DC subtypes in the tumor-draining lymph node (TDLN). Systemic administration of polySTING slowed tumor growth in a B16-F10 murine melanoma model as well as a 4T1 murine breast cancer model with an acceptable safety profile. Thus, we demonstrate that polySTING delivers STING agonists to professional APCs after systemic administration, generating efficacious DC-driven antitumor immunity with minimal side effects. This new polymeric prodrug platform may offer new opportunities for combining efficient targeted STING agonist delivery with other selective tumor therapeutic strategies.