On-demand intracellular amplification of chemoradiation with cancer-specific plasmonic nanobubbles
Menée in vitro et in vivo, cette étude évalue l'efficacité d'une stratégie thérapeutique, basée sur la formation d'un agrégat intracellulaire composé de nanoparticules d'or et de nanocapsules transportant une substance active, pour amplifier localement l'effet des rayons X ou de la chimiothérapie et favoriser la destruction des cellules tumorales via l'éclatement de nanobulles plasmoniques induites par un laser pulsé
Chemoradiation-resistant cancers limit treatment efficacy and safety. We show here the cancer cell-specific, on-demand intracellular amplification of chemotherapy and chemoradiation therapy via gold nanoparticle- and laser pulse-induced mechanical intracellular impact. Cancer aggressiveness promotes the clustering of drug nanocarriers and gold nanoparticles in cancer cells. This cluster, upon exposure to a laser pulse, generates a plasmonic nanobubble, the mechanical explosion that destroys the host cancer cell or ejects the drug into its cytoplasm by disrupting the liposome and endosome. The same cluster locally amplifies external X-rays. Intracellular synergy of the mechanical impact of plasmonic nanobubble, ejected drug and amplified X-rays improves the efficacy of standard chemoradiation in resistant and aggressive head and neck cancer by 100-fold in vitro and 17-fold in vivo, reduces the effective entry doses of drugs and X-rays to 2-6% of their clinical doses and efficiently spares normal cells. The developed quadrapeutics technology combines four clinically validated components and transforms a standard macrotherapy into an intracellular on-demand theranostic microtreatment with radically amplified therapeutic efficacy and specificity.