Breaking Barriers in Breast Cancer Treatment: Harnessing Lipid-Based Nanovesicles for Local Transdermal Therapy

Abstract

Breast cancer (BC) is considered the leading type of cancer among women globally. Several treatment strategies are available for BC management including surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. Despite the efficiency of most systemic chemotherapeutic agents, none could achieve patients’ compliance rather than compromising their quality of life due to their severe side effects. Thus, considerable attention has been paid to exploring an efficient and localized alternative drug delivery route for BC management surpassing the obstacles of the traditional administration routes. Local transdermal therapy (LTT) is an emerging drug delivery approach under investigation for targeted BC treatment, as it could efficiently provide a localized subcutaneous drug accumulation upon topical application on breast skin rather than the systemic drug distribution. Nevertheless, the protective function of the skin could be a hurdle for the optimal drug transportation into the deep breast tissue. Thus, encapsulating drugs within suitable nanocarriers could be one of the potential strategies to defeat this limitation. Flexible nanovesicles mainly transferosomes (TFs) and high penetration vesicles (HPVs) have been investigated for enhancing anticancer drugs percutaneous delivery via LTT. Moreover, their composition, mechanism of skin penetration, different preparation methods, and characterization tests have been also discussed in detail. Therefore, harnessing of penetrable nanocarriers for targeting novel anticancer candidates employing the LTT pathway could be a promising avenue for the optimal management of BC. Furthermore, the integration of different machine learning (ML) algorithms for the selection of optimal nanocarrier systems for targeted drug delivery provides a brighter future for BC treatment.