Researchers designed tiny particles that can be implanted at a cancer tumor site, where they deliver two types of therapy: heat and chemotherapy.
Patients with late-stage cancer often have to endure multiple rounds of different types of treatment, which can cause unwanted side effects and may not always help.
"One of the examples where this particular technology could be useful is trying to control the growth of really fast-growing tumors," says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research."The goal would be to gain some control over these tumors for patients that don't really have a lot of options, and this could either prolong their life or at least allow them to have a better quality of life during this period.
The MIT team wanted to come up with a way to deliver phototherapy and chemotherapy together, which they thought could make the treatment process easier on the patient and might also have synergistic effects. They decided to use an inorganic material called molybdenum sulfide as the phototherapeutic agent. This material converts laser light to heat very efficiently, which means that low-powered lasers can be used.
"The advantage of this platform is that it can act on demand in a pulsatile manner," Kanelli says."You administer it once through an intratumoral injection, and then using an external laser source you can activate the platform, release the drug, and at the same time achieve thermal ablation of the tumor cells."
"This machine-learning-optimized laser system really allows us to deploy low-dose, localized chemotherapy by leveraging the deep tissue penetration of near-infrared light for pulsatile, on-demand photothermal therapy. This synergistic effect results in low systemic toxicity compared to conventional chemotherapy regimens," says Neelkanth Bardhan, a Break Through Cancer research scientist in the Belcher Lab, and second author of the paper.
The polymer used to make the particles is biocompatible and has already been FDA-approved for medical devices. The researchers now hope to test the particles in larger animal models, with the goal of eventually evaluating them in clinical trials. They expect that this treatment could be useful for any type of solid tumor, including metastatic tumors.Maria Kanelli, Neelkanth M. Bardhan, Morteza Sarmadi, Behnaz Eshaghi, Shahad K. Alsaiari, William T.
Brain Tumor Cancer Colon Cancer Optics Medical Technology Physics Nanotechnology
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