Indocyanine Green-Loaded Ferritin Nanoparticles for Intraoperative Detection of Cancer Tissue

Abstract

Extended Abstract Background: Nanotechnology represents one of the most promising field of study in this century, considering that its application to medicine is becoming fundamental in the diagnosis and treatment of several diseases such as cancer. Since chemotherapy often suffers from limited effectiveness and specificity against cancer cells, causing important side effects and toxicity in healthy tissues, the main clinical option is still usually represented by surgery. In this context, the development of nano-tracers with tumor specificity to achieve an accurate and timely diagnosis could be of crucial importance. In recent years, several studies have been carried out using nanoparticles of ferritin (HFn), that offer new therapeutic options, potentially allowing the specific drug delivery to cancer cells, as well as the possibility of exploiting them as nano-tracers for tumor detection and fluorescence-guided surgery (FGS) applications. Indeed, one of the most important features of HFn is its natural homing towards cancer cells thanks to the specific recognition of the transferrin-1 receptor (TfR1), which is abundantly expressed in most tumor subtypes [1-4]. Objectives: To support surgeons during intraoperative tumor and metastasis localization, we proposed the use of ferritin nanoparticles