Neoadjuvant nano-photothermal therapy used before operation effectively assists in surgery for breast cancer

Nano-photothermal therapy (NPTT) has attracted increasing interest recently due to its high efficiency, excellent selectivity and non-ionizing radiation damage. Despite a tremendous amount of exciting pre-clinical results reported in the past few years, however, the further clinic application of NPTT is still difficult. To combine NPTT with clinical surgery more closely, novel multifunctional optical-magnetic nanosystems have been synthesized and applied for preoperative NPTT to assist in the follow-up surgery, termed "neoadjuvant NPTT". Remarkably, nanoparticles are mainly aggregated in the cytoplasm of tumor cells in vitro and largely accumulated in the tumor in vivo 24 h after injection. Under the guidance of tri-modality imaging, preoperative NPTT could shrink the tumor in a short time and make the boundary between the tumor and surrounding normal tissues clearer, which is conducive to subsequent surgery resection. Furthermore, the 50% survival rate is up to 50 days compared with 35 days for standard surgery, 31 days for PTT alone and 24 days for non-surgery groups. Therefore, NPTT can effectively assist in surgery used before operation. This study provides a new idea for the clinical transformation of NPTT in the future.