One of the current challenges in biomedicine is to develop safe and effective nanomedicines for selective tumor therapy. [1] Recently, near-infrared (NIR) light absorbing plasmonic nanomaterials have attracted intensive attention for their hyperthemia therapy to kill tumorigenic cells without damaging normal cells, such as gold nanorods, [2] gold nanocages, [3] Au x Ag 1-x dendrites, [4] gold nanoshells on polystyrene spheres, [5] assembled gold nanoparticles [6] and many multifunctional nanocomposites. [7] Our previous study reported a novel material of gold nanoshells on drug-loaded silica nanorattles which can combine the hyperthermia with chemotherapy to optimize cancer therapy whose synergistic effects are greater than the two individual treatments alone. [8] Despite the successful application of many gold-based NIR absorbing materials in cancer therapy, most studies of them rely on the passive targeting effect (the so-called enhanced permeability and retention, EPR effect) to direct nanocarriers at tumor sites through the enhanced permeability of tumor vasculature and the decreased draining efficacy of tumor lymphatics. [9,10] The lack of cell specific interactions may decrease the therapeutic efficacy and thus need a relatively long NIR light irradiation time (30 min in vitro, e.g.), [11] a high NIR laser light irradiation intensity (35 W cm -2 in vitro, e.g.), [12] or repeated injections and NIR laser light irradiations [8] as the previous reports. Furthermore, not all tumors exhibit EPR effect which can enhance the preferential accumulation of nanoparticles in the tumor. [13,14] For clinical applications, a more effective drug delivery strategy should be developed to promote the binding and internalization of nanocarrier through their specific interactions with the receptors expressed on the cell surface of interest. [15] Transferrin (abbreviated hereinafter as Tf) is one of the widely used targeting ligand. Because of rapid cell division and stringent demand for iron (for heme synthesis), many cancer cell types have abundant expression of Tf receptors (TfRs).[16] Tf has been used to enhance the cellular uptake of gold nanoparticles [17] and quantum dots/rods. [18] To the best of our knowledge, Tf-conjugated gold-based nanoparticles for both hyperthermia and chemotherapy of cancer cells have been rarely reported. Most importantly, there are few comparative studies on in vivo excretion/clearance, safety, and efficacy of targeted conjugated and non-conjugated nanotherapeutics, while elucidating these in vivo studies is considered very important regarding the safety and validity of novel nanocarrier systems. [19] In view of this pressing need for more efficient treatment modalities, we engineered a kind of Tf and PEG functionalized gold nanoshells on silica nanorattles (pGSNs-Tf) for ablation of breast carcinoma in the present study. We hypothesized that the targeting pGSNs-Tf can preferentially bind to breast cancer cells rather than normal cells and then increase the efficiency of thermo-chemotherapy ab...