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Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering

Volume 27, 2025

Therapeutic Ultrasound for Multimodal Cancer Treatment: A Spotlight on Breast Cancer

  • Zehra E.F. Demir1 and Natasha D. Sheybani1,2
  • 1Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA; email: [email protected], [email protected] 2Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
  • Vol. 27:371-402 (Volume publication date May 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on February 19, 2025
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Cancer remains a leading cause of mortality worldwide, and the demand for improved efficacy, precision, and safety of management options has never been greater. Focused ultrasound (FUS) is a rapidly emerging strategy for nonionizing, noninvasive intervention that holds promise for the multimodal treatment of solid cancers. Owing to its versatile array of bioeffects, this technology is now being evaluated across preclinical and clinical oncology trials for tumor ablation, therapeutic delivery, radiosensitization, sonodynamic therapy, and enhancement of tumor-specific immune responses. Given the breadth of this burgeoning domain, this review places a spotlight on recent advancements in breast cancer care to exemplify the multifaceted role of FUS technology for oncology indications—outlining physical principles of FUS-mediated thermal and mechanical bioeffects, giving an overview of results from recent preclinical and clinical studies investigating FUS with and without adjunct therapeutics in primary or disseminated breast cancer settings, and offering perspectives on the future of the field.

Keyword(s): breast cancer, cancer immunotherapy, drug delivery, focused ultrasound, HIFU, image-guided therapy, metastasis
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-bioeng-103023-111151
2025-05-01
2025-06-14
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-bioeng-103023-111151
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Therapeutic Ultrasound for Multimodal Cancer Treatment: A Spotlight on Breast Cancer
Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering 27, 371 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-bioeng-103023-111151
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-bioeng-103023-111151
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-bioeng-103023-111151
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