Cooperative, nanoparticle-enabled thermal therapy of breast cancer

Despite decades of effort on research and drug development for cancer treatment, cancer still remains one of the major causes of human deaths in the world [1]. Human cancers consist of mixed population of malignant cells that carry multiple genetic mutations. It has been estimated that there are around 40 DNA mutations that result in amino acid changes in an individual tumor of glioblastoma [2] or pancreatic cancer [3], and twice as many mutations in breast and colorectal cancers [4]. Many of them are driver mutations that determine tumor initiation, progression and metastasis. The genomic landscapes indicate that multiple signal transduction pathways determine the fate of a cancer cell, and it is almost impossible to treat cancer with a single therapeutic agent. It is thus not surprising that many of the recently developed targeted therapy drugs, such as the EGFR inhibitors for non-small-cell lung cancer treatment and Herceptin for breast cancer therapy, are effective in only a certain set of cancer patients [5, 6]; and in many cases, drug resistance arises from additional genetic and epigenetic alterations. It has been reported that mutations within the EGFR gene [7, 8], the KRAS gene [9, 10], and up-regulation of other signaling pathways [11, 12] could all cause resistance to EGFR-targeted therapy. Clearly, there is an urgent and persistent motivation to develop novel therapeutics independent of cancer genetic background in the fight against this deadly disease.