Among various types of cancers, breast cancer is one of the most frequent
and major reasons of cancer death among women worldwide. It has the ability to
spread to different organs of the body and develop metastases. Till date, chemotherapy
is the most common option for the treatment of breast cancer. However, chemotherapy
is not a very successful strategy to cure breast cancer and has decreased the survival
rates according to the different breast cancer reports. The inability to deliver a specific
drug to the target tissue/cell that causes toxicity to the normal healthy tissue/cell is the
primary concern in the chemotherapy. Most of the chemotherapeutic drugs used in
conventional chemotherapy have low aqueous solubility and high pre-systemic
metabolism; therefore, they are biologically less available to the target location and
affect normal healthy tissues/cell as well. Since the last decades, the development of
nanoparticle technology has opened a new option in the successful treatment of breast
cancer due to the various unique advantages offered by this nanoplatform. Among
them, polymeric nanomedicines become the promising choice as the effective drug
delivery system and provide great potential in the management of breast cancers as per
the outcome of different preclinical studies. Polymeric nanomedicines may exhibit their
anticancer efficacy either via passive or active targeting approach. Polymeric
nanomedicines can be actively targeted by its surface conjugation to the breast cancerspecific
targeting ligands. Active targeting of the nanomedicines has the ability to
deliver the specific drug to the target site, therefore, healthy cells remain unaffected by
active targeting. Moreover, polymeric nanomedicines have also been exploited in
breast cancer treatment through gene therapy. This chapter summarizes the extensive
literature of preclinical findings on polymeric nanomedicines exploited in the treatment
of breast cancer.
Keywords: Breast Cancer, Chemotherapy, Polymeric Nanomedicine, Targeted
Delivery, Ligand, Preclinical Studies.
