Chapter 4 - Current status of nanomedicine for breast cancer treatment

Abstract

Chemotherapy represents a mainstay in breast cancer therapy, especially in advanced or metastatic disease or in certain types of breast cancer such as triple-negative breast tumors. The chemotherapeutic agents available today show, in general, a high toxicity due to their nonspecific distribution. Moreover, some of them show a high lipophilicity and require the use of organic solvents for their administration, which increase the overall toxicity of the formulation. The use of nanocarriers for their administration could resolve these challenges, eliminating the use of organic solvents and resulting in a more selective location of the drug at the tumor mass, which would allow for a decrease in the drug toxicity and an increase its efficacy. Chemo-nanotherapy represents an excellent strategy in the treatment of breast cancer, with 10 nanomedicines marketed and 21 nanoformulations in clinical research. However, despite all their advantages, the final approval of new nanomedicines for breast cancer has some limitations, including the toxicity related to the small size of nanocarriers, the lack of correlation of preclinical/clinical efficacy, the high costs of their industrial production, and the difficulty in obtaining reproducible large batches.