Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a life-threatening form of breast cancer which has been found to account for 15% of all the subtypes of breast cancer. Currently available treatments are significantly less effective in TNBC management because of several factors such as poor bioavailability, low specificity, multidrug resistance, poor cellular uptake, and unwanted side effects being the major ones. As a rapidly growing field, nano-therapeutics offers promising alternatives for breast cancer treatment. This platform provides a suitable pathway for crossing biological barriers and allowing sustained systemic circulation time and an improved pharmacokinetic profile of the drug. Apart from this, it also provides an optimized target-specific drug delivery system and improves drug accumulation in tumor cells. This review provides insights into the molecular mechanisms associated with the pathogenesis of TNBC, along with summarizing the conventional therapy and recent advances of different nano-carriers for the management of TNBC.
Keywords: biological barriers; inorganic nanoparticles; nano-therapeutics; organic nanoparticles; organic-inorganic hybrid nanoparticle; triple-negative breast cancer; tumor microenvironment.