Introduction: Globally, breast cancer (BC) is the most common cancer among women (~30 % of all new cancer cases annually) and will be the second leading cause of death among women (~42,170) in the United States, 2025 (https://www.breastcancer. org/facts-statistics). It is conventionally treated by surgery, radio-, hormone-, chemo-, and targeted therapies, and its treatment depends upon its subtype, stage, and degree of metastasis. Self-healing hydrogels (SHHs) are an innovative approach for the management of BC owing to their distinct properties like self-healability, shear-thinning property, injectability, and stimuli responsiveness, and can be used as a multimodal platform for synergistic cancer therapy.
Methods: The literature (research and review articles) was retrieved from various search engines like Google Scholar, Scopus, Science Direct, and PubMed, using keywords such as self-healing hydrogels, breast cancer, and chemotherapy, from 2013 to Feb 2025.
Results: SHHs are used as a multimodal platform for managing BC using diverse approaches like stimuli-responsive release of chemotherapeutics, co-delivery of drugs, phototherapy, chemodynamic therapy, starvation therapy, and sonodynamic therapies or combination therapies. Moreover, these hydrogels are durable, reusable, and fatigue-resistant and can restore their structural integrity even after multiple destructions within a few seconds/hours. Additionally, SHHs can also adjust their pore structure because of persistent break-healing cycles, leading to higher encapsulation of chemotherapeutics with uniform distribution.
Conclusion: Owing to their distinct properties, SHHs can be used as a promising carrier for the delivery of chemotherapeutics with synergistic anticancer activity on BC cells, even at minimal adverse effects, either alone or in combination with other novel strategies.