Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC)
is a breast cancer subtype.
At present, TNBC patients do not have approved targeted therapy. Therefore,
patients primarily depend on forceful systemic chemotherapy that has
unavoidable harmful side effects, resulting in inadequate therapeutic
outcomes and leading to a high mortality rate. Hence, there is an
urgent need to develop targeted therapies for the TNBC populace. Developing
a new nanotherapeutic approach of combinational therapy could be an
effective alternative strategy. Therefore, we designed a combination
of hyaluronan (HA)–polyaniline (PANi)–imiquimod (R837),
denoted as HA-PANi/R837, nanoparticles (NPs) that exhibited a high
extinction coefficient of 8.23 × 108 M–1 cm–1 and adequate photothermal conversion efficiency
(PCE) (η = 41.6%), making them an efficient photothermal agent
(PTA) that is highly beneficial for selective CD44-mediated photothermal
ablation of TNBC tumors. Furthermore, co-encapsulation of R837 (toll-like
receptor 7 agonist) immunoadjuvant molecules triggers an immune response
against the tumor. The formed CD44-targeted HA-PANi/R837 NPs’
selectivity incinerates the tumor under near-infrared (NIR)-triggered
photothermal ablation, generating tumor-associated antigens and triggering
R837 combination with anti-CTLA-4 for immunogenic cell death (ICD)
activation to kill the remaining tumor cells in mice and protect against
tumor relapse and metastasis. Our results demonstrated that novel
HA-PANi/R837 NP-induced photothermal ICD achieved in CD44-targeted
TNBC is a promising application.
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