Recent Advances in the Treatment of Bone Metastases and Primary Bone Tumors: An Up-to-Date Review

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Bone represents a common metastatic site for patients with advanced cancers while also being associated with rare but challenging primary tumors. As the treatment of bone sarcomas and metastases encountered a slowdown in its development, complementary and alternative strategies to conventional therapies started being investigated. In this respect, this paper proposes a comprehensive path, beginning with the types of bone tumors and current treatment options, and further detailing the recent advancements in the field, including adjuvant therapies, targeted drug delivery, novel bone substitutes, and multifunctional tissue-engineered scaffolds with synergic properties. ABSTRACT: In the last decades, the treatment of primary and secondary bone tumors has faced a slow-down in its development, being mainly based on chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgical interventions. However, these conventional therapeutic strategies present a series of disadvantages (e.g., multidrug resistance, tumor recurrence, severe side effects, formation of large bone defects), which limit their application and efficacy. In recent years, these procedures were combined with several adjuvant therapies, with different degrees of success. To overcome the drawbacks of current therapies and improve treatment outcomes, other strategies started being investigated, like carrier-mediated drug delivery, bone substitutes for repairing bone defects, and multifunctional scaffolds with bone tissue regeneration and antitumor properties. Thus, this paper aims to present the types of bone tumors and their current treatment approaches, further focusing on the recent advances in new therapeutic alternatives.