Bovine Serum Albumin-Based Magnetic Nanocarrier forMRI Diagnosis and Hyperthermic Therapy: A PotentialTheranostic Approach Against Cancer

After the 2005 milestone in clinical application of paclitaxel– albumin nanoparticles (NPs) for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer, albumin NPs have been thoroughly investigated as effective delivery systems in nanomedicine. This has led to increasing interest in the use of bovine serum albumin (BSA) as nanocarrier for applications in nanomedicine, due to the possibility to coat lipophilicNPs and because it can be considered a crucial step before moving to its human version, human serum albumin (HSA).The scientific community is seeking to exploit the intrinsic properties of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) to obtain medical breakthroughs in diagnosis and therapy. One of the main advantages of magnetic NPs is that they can be visualized acting as magnetic contrast agents (CA) for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Heated in a high-frequency magnetic field they trigger drug release or produce hyperthermia/ablation of tissues, currently reported as magnetic fluid hyperthermia (MFH). Experimental results for our theranostic nanomedicine BSACoFe2O4-1 led to the following considerations:from the relaxometry data the transverse r2 relaxivity of BSA-CoFe2O4-1 is higher than Endorem, suggesting our compound would make a good negative MRIcontrast agent and allow enhanced hyperthermic efficiency even with reduced fields and frequencies applied.