Breast cancer continues to pose a significant global health burden, characterized by its heterogeneous nature and complex pathophysiology. Standard treatment modalities encompass surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, and targeted therapies. Despite these therapies leading to improved survival rates, they are associated with significant side effects, including nausea, alopecia, fatigue, and cardiotoxicity, which adversely impact patient quality of life and treatment adherence. Multiple challenges persist in effectively managing breast cancer, including the development of resistance to chemotherapy agents. Although chemotherapy is the first line of treatment for breast cancer, it has many challenges and limitations. These include drug resistance, high toxicity, tumor heterogeneity, and non-specificity of the chemotherapeutic agents, thereby increasing the need for more targeted and effective therapeutic strategies. Nanoparticles, liposomes, micelles and polymer-based carriers are some of the drug delivery systems that have been designed to enhance targeting specificity for therapeutic agents. Solid lipid nanoparticles are an example of such colloidal drug delivery systems. They are advantageous over their conventional drug delivery systems such as better stability, controlled release profile and an increased biocompatibility. The lipid matrix of SLNs could protect the encapsulated drugs from degradation and assists in efficiently delivery to target tissues hence increasing therapeutic efficacy with less dosing intervals.

Dr. Sudha Rathod* & Aishwarya Katkar, Puja Vyawhare

solid lipid nanoparticles, breast cancer, chemotherapy, nano drug delivery systems, Solid lipid nanoparticles