ABSTRACT
Cancer diagnoses in the United States number over a million per year. Worldwide, this number tops 10 million. While surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, photodynamic therapy (PDT), and psoralen + UVA (PUVA) can be used to treat various types of cancer, many additional lives could be saved via development of more universally applicable, minimally invasive approaches to therapy. e rapidly developing eld of nanomedicine has attempted to leverage the untapped potential of nanomaterials to improve drug targeting to and uptake by tumors, locally activating therapeutic agents, and limiting the side eects that may negatively aect patients’ quality of life.1-4
Attempts to develop so-called nanodrugs typically take one of three approaches. In the rst, nanoparticles aid in the transport and delivery of chemotherapeutic agents.5-8 is methodology has shown some potential, particularly in reducing the side eects of chemotherapy.9 A second approach uses the nanoparticles themselves as a means of enhancing the eects of more traditional treatment strategies.8,10-15 Two techniques that fall into this category are induction of hyperthermia when illuminating gold nanoshells with infrared light13-14 or enhancement of reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation using gold nanomaterials and x-ray radiation.12,16-18 A third, less-proven application of nanodrugs in
14.1 Introduction ......................................................................................315 14.2 Approach ............................................................................................ 316 14.3 Experimental ..................................................................................... 318
14.4 Results and Discussion ....................................................................319 14.5 Conclusions........................................................................................323 Acknowledgments ........................................................................................323 References ......................................................................................................323
cancer therapy is combination of ROS-generating PDT drugs with nanoparticles that emit UV or visible photons through upconversion of infrared light or downconversion of x-ray radiation.19-26
