Nanofibrous drug delivery systems for breast cancer: a review.

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women. Breast-conserving surgery (BCS) is becoming a preferred approach for treating non-invasive or early-stage breast cancer cases. However, local-regional recurrence (LRR) is one of the critical risk factors after BCS. As many as 10-20% of BCS cases may show LRR within 5 years and almost 50% within 10 years. Radiation therapy is one of the treatments used to prevent LRR after breast-conserving surgery. However, because of possible side-effects of radiation therapy, targeted drug delivery systems based on nanofibers loaded with anti-cancer drugs have been explored in recent years to control LRR after BCS. This paper aims to review different polymers and anti-cancer drugs used for developing nanofibrous drug delivery systems against other breast cancer cell lines. It was observed that the utilization of nanofibers scaffolds after mastectomy could decrease the recurrence of breast cancer cells to a great extent as these nanofibrous scaffolds release drugs in a sustained manner for a prolonged time. Besides, the side effects of chemotherapy on healthy cells could be avoided. To the best of our knowledge, no such review paper is available in the literature that focuses only on the nanofibers-based system for breast cancer therapy.