Ablate and radiate:Radioactive magnetic nanoparticles for combined thermal ablation and brachytherapy of breast cancer patients

The research described in this thesis focusses on the development of a novel treatment strategy for early-stage breast cancer. Conventional treatment of early-stage breast cancer usually involves surgical removal of the tumor tissue, after which the remaining tissue undergoes chemo- and/or radiotherapy to complete the treatment. Current treatments are effective, but also come with many side effects. As radiotherapy can take 3 to 6 weeks of daily hospital visits to receive the complete treatment, it can also be time-consuming and exhausting for the patients. Shortening the treatment time can be beneficial for patients both in the Western world to reduce the use of precious hospital time and for the low and middle income countries where long travel times to the hospital affects the patient acceptance of extensive, multi-week radiotherapy treatments. Therefore, this thesis focusses on developing an alternative one-day hospical treatment as the ideal approach for early-stage breast cancer patients. In this procedure the tumor core is destroyed using thermal ablation, followed by the irradiation of the tumor cells surrounding the tumor core by radioactive seeds. To do this, a novel multi-modal strategy using nanoparticles was developed. The proposed procedure involves thermo-nanobrachytherapy using hybrid nanoparticles composed of iron oxide and 103Pd, a therapeutic radioisotope commonly used in low dose rate (LDR) brachytherapy for breast cancer. The development of these radioactive magnetic nanoparticles (RMNPs) is the essence of this thesis.