Volume: 56 Issue: 4
Year: 2025, Page: 723-729, Doi: https://doi.org/10.51966/jvas.2025.56.4.723-729
Received: Dec. 9, 2025 Accepted: Dec. 16, 2025 Published: Dec. 31, 2025
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is commonly treated with systemic chemotherapy, which often results in dose-limiting off-target toxicity. In the present study, we evaluated the in-vivo safety of an injectable, drug-loaded hydrogel implant designed for localized and sustained intratumoral chemotherapy delivery in an orthotopic TNBC mouse model. Female NOD-SCID mice bearing MDA-MB-231 tumours were treated with either blank hydrogel, free chemotherapeutic drugs administered via tail vein, or intratumoral injection of the drug-loaded hydrogel. Eight weeks post-treatment, major organs including the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, spleen, brain, ovaries, and urinary bladder were harvested and subjected to histopathological evaluation using haematoxylin and eosin staining. Systemic administration of free drugs resulted in marked architectural damage in multiple organs, including cardiomyocyte disorganization, renal glomerular damage, splenic structural disruption, ovarian follicular depletion, and bladder wall degeneration. In contrast, mice treated with the intratumoral drug-loaded hydrogel exhibited well-preserved tissue architecture across all examined organs, comparable to control and blank hydrogel groups. These findings demonstrate that localized intratumoral delivery of chemotherapeutic agents via hydrogel significantly reduces systemic toxicity while preserving normal organ morphology, highlighting its potential as a safer localized drug delivery platform for TNBC.
Keywords: Chemotherapy, toxicity, localized drug delivery
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© 2025 Naresh Goud & Vinod Kumar. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
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Naresh Goud L, Vinod Kumar G.S .2025. In-vivo safety evaluation of drug loaded hydrogel implant delivery system in orthotopic triple negative breast cancer model. J. Vet. Anim. Sci. 56 (4): 723-729