SUMMARY

Despite significant medical advances, breast cancer (BC) remains a leading cause of cancer-related death in women worldwide, with approximately 2.1 million cases reported each year worldwide. The high mortality rate of BC is mainly because of:  (i) the lack of early detection that could significantly improve prognosis, due to limitations of imaging methods currently used, such as X-Ray mammograms, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or ultrasound, which suffer from artefacts, low specificity or limited spatial resolution; (ii) treatment complications, such as high systemic toxicity of anticancer drugs or development of drug resistance leading to treatment failures. Triple negative breast cancers (TNBCs) represent around 15-20% of BC tumors and do not express any predictive / therapeutic biological markers. Therefore, for TNBCs, non-targeted chemotherapy is the only treatment option, and although most patients initially respond well to this treatment, most of them relapse with distant metastases. At this stage, the tumors present a complex genetic reprogramming, whose clinical manifestation includes resistance to further treatment, usually with fatal consequences. Consequently, there is an imminent need to develop novel targeted strategies for the diagnosis and treatment of TNBC. Nanotechnology offers new promise in mitigating TNBC mortality, through the possibility of combining precise early-stage TNBC diagnosis with more effective and safe treatments, in the same nanostructured device (termed theranostic). The aim of this project is to apply a multidisciplinary approach in order to develop and evaluate a novel multifunctional theranostic nanostructure, which would be able to combine ultra-sensitive fluorescence imaging of TNBC tumours with multimodal cancer treatment.

The proposed research will develop a platform technology, allowing the NanoParticles to be size-tunable, tunable for NIR dyes of various wavelengths and flexible to a wide range of targeting ligands and drug loading (and therefore other cancer types, opening up new opportunities for on-demand therapy). The research is structured upon three Research Objectives:

Research Objective 1-Design and synthesis of NanoParticles;

Research Objective 2-Colloidal stability, photostability and biocompatibility of NanoParticles; and

Research Objective 3-In vitro and in vivo testing of NanoParticle delivery and efficacy.

Schematic of the project: Development and evaluation of multifunctional nanostructures with tunable sizes/optical properties, for near-infrared metal-enhanced fluorescence imaging and multimodal therapy of breast cancer.

Morphological properties of uncoated and mesoporous silica (MS)-coated AuNBPs NanoParticles 

Our article entitled “Gold Nanobipyramids for Near-Infrared Fluorescence Enhanced Imaging and Treatment of Triple Negative Breast Cancer” has been submitted for publication!