ACTIVITY OF QUERCETIN SOLID LIPID NANOPARTICLES ON MCF-7 BREAST CANCER CELL LINES

Cancer is one of the most important diseases in the world, and represents one of the most important clinical challenges due to its high incidence rate (with an estimated 18.1 million new cases in 2018) , its variability and heterogeneity, with lung, breast, colorectal and prostate cancer being the most frequent .Together with this, the particular aggressiveness of some kinds of cancers and the lack of definitive curative treatments, with 9.6 million deaths estimated for 2018 by GLOBOCAN , make cancer a major priority in current biomedical research. Currently, treatments for cancer are mainly focused on surgical resection, when feasible, and/or chemotherapy, radiation and hormonal therapies. Chemotherapeutic agents commonly used have numerous side effects (insomnia, fatigue, cognitive impairment, nausea, vomiting, anemia, weight loss) that diminish the quality of life of patients and, in many cases, are not sufficient due to the high relapse rate, which results in low survival rates in most cases. In this aspect, nanoparticles have emerged as a new opportunity, since they are able to be specifically addressed to a target, display a controlled release of their load, increase half-life time in blood plasma, decrease the side effects caused by chemotherapeutic agents, which include systemic toxicity, and decrease the off-target distribution, or improve the accumulation of the drug at the tumor site