Biomarker-targeted fluorescent probes for breast cancer imaging

Breast cancer has become a common tumor worldwide which seriously endangers people’s health. Early diagnosis and treatment are particularly urgent in order to reduce the onset risk, mortality, and prolong the five-year survival rate. Therefore, we need a kind of diagnosis and treatment technology with high specificity, sensitivity and selectivity. In recent years, because of its unique properties in biological applications, fluorescence imaging has become an attractive research subject. Fluorescence imaging offers innovative ideas of targetable recognition of breast cancer cells, breast cancer imaging in vivo animal models, anticancer drugs delivery for guiding the mammary surgery via a noninvasive way with high sensitively and specifically. In this review, we summarized the recent advances of fluorescent probes for breast cancer imaging, which were classified according to different biomarkers the probes recognized. Moreover, we discussed the strengths, built-in problems as well as the challenges about the fluorescent probe as a unique potential method for the better application in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.