Recent Advances and Evolving Strategies of Photothermal Immunotherapy in Pancreatic Cancer Treatment

ABSTRACT Pancreatic cancer, particularly pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), is very lethal with a poor prognosis. The outcome of traditional treatments for PDAC, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, remains unsatisfactory. Recently, immunotherapy, such as mRNA vaccines, immune checkpoint inhibitors, and chimeric antigen receptor T‐cells (CAR‐T), has shown encouraging advancement at the early stage and provided new opportunities for pancreatic cancer treatment. However, none of the immunotherapies have induced a significant improvement in the clinical prognosis of PDAC till now. Novel pancreatic cancer therapeutic research and development have attracted scientists' keen interest. Photothermal therapy (PTT) is demonstrated to be able to not only directly induce tumor cell death through localized thermal ablation, but also promote antitumor immune response under appropriate conditions, with the release of damage‐associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) and tumor‐associated antigens (TAAs) from tumor cells, followed by activation of antigen‐presenting cells (APCs) and T cell infiltration to kill tumor cells. This review outlines the current treatment strategies and advances of pancreatic cancer, with a focus on the latest evolving research progress based on PTT and immunotherapy. The application prospects and challenges for photothermal immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer treatment are discussed.