Docetaxel-loaded nanoformulations delivery for breast cancer management: Challenges, recent advances, and future perspectives

Breast cancer (BC) is a major health and financial hardship globally, and conventional chemotherapy has bounded success in thoroughly treating the disease. It can result in severe side effects and damage to healthy cells. Docetaxel (DTX)-loaded nanoformulations (NFs) are suggested to overcome these complications. This review aims to emphasize the importance of NFs in BC therapy, focusing on NF-based DTX, their challenges, recent advances, and future perspectives. The effectiveness of DTX in BC treatment is hindered by various challenges, such as resistance to therapy, recurrence, toxicity, and systemic side effects. DTX-incorporated NFs have shown remarkable antitumor activity against BC in preclinical and clinical settings. For instance, DTX-loaded liposomes have been shown to suppress tumor growth significantly and increase survival time in MCF-7 tumor-bearing mice compared to control and Taxone (commercial DTX) groups. Recently, the co-delivery of NFs consisting of DTX, and functional foods augmented to mitigate the DTX resistance and revealed promising therapeutic outcomes. Several clinical studies have shown that DTX NFs were better tolerated than conventional DTX. Currently, novel NF approaches have effectively addressed the issue of hypersensitivity reactions associated with the existing clinical formulations of DTX. Some unresolved aspects remain, such as finding a suitable alternative to a DTX nanocarrier regimen for a particular illness, determining the most effective combinational delivery and scheduling methods, and identifying predictive biomarkers. Therefore, in the future, establishing an in vivo animal model using recent BC cell lines from patients would be an invaluable tool to assess the efficacy and safety of novel strategies in BC management. Additionally, distinct regulatory protocols, coupled with considerations regarding safety, need to be set up to govern the utilization of NFs in managing BC.