Photothermal therapy (PTT) is a highly clinical application promising
cancer treatment strategy with safe, convenient
surgical procedures and excellent therapeutic efficacy on superficial
tumors. However, a single PTT is difficult to eliminate
tumor cells completely, and
tumor recurrence and
metastasis are prone to occur in the later stage. Chemo-photothermal synergistic
therapy can conquer the shortcomings by further killing
residual tumor cells after PTT through systemic
chemotherapy. Nevertheless,
chemotherapy drugs' extreme toxicity is also a problematic issue to be solved, such as
anthracycline-induced
cardiotoxicity. Herein, we selected
polydopamine nanoparticles (PDA) as the carrier of the chemotherapeutic
drug doxorubicin (DOX) to construct a versatile PDA(DOX) nanoplatform for chemo-photothermal synergistic
therapy against
breast cancer and simultaneously attenuated DOX-induced
cardiotoxicity (
DIC). The excellent photothermal properties of PDA were used to achieve the thermal ablation of
tumors. DOX carried out
chemotherapy to kill residual and occult distant
tumors. Furthermore, the PDA(DOX) nanoparticles significantly alleviate
DIC, which benefits from PDA's excellent
antioxidant enzyme activity. The experimental data of the
chemotherapy groups showed that the results of the PDA(DOX) group were much better than the DOX group. This study not only effectively inhibits
cancer but tactfully attenuates
DIC, bringing a new perspective into synergistic
therapy against
breast cancer.