At diagnosis, most patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have non-resectable tumors or cannot withstand surgery; creating a need for treatment alternatives. Radiotherapy has become one of the primary tools to treat and prevent the spread of abnormal cancerous cells and is used to treat a variety of cancer types. Radiotherapy can be used on its own, after surgery, or concurrent or after chemotherapy, as high energy radiation shrinks tumors and kills cancer cells. Gold nanoparticles (Au nps) are efficient sensitizers for radiation therapy. When incorporated into tumor tissue and irradiated, Au nps specifically enhance the radiation effects up to 200%. This leads to a higher dose of X-rays to the cancerous tissue as compared with normal tissue during a radiotherapy treatment. Au nps have been demonstrated to be effective radiosensitizers in solid tumors with an effect directly on DNA damage as well as a release of tumor antigens. Importantly, the radioenhancing effect of Au nps can be exploited for triggering a systemic immunological response to distributed metastases through the abscopal effect, which has been observed clinically as a result of radiotherapy. We propose to test the theory that enhanced radiotherapy through delivery of Au nps can produce an anti-tumor response for lung cancer treatment. Intratumoral injection of Au nps combined with X-ray radiation as therapy for Lewis Lung carcinoma is presented for C57BL/6 mice inoculated with cells expressing luciferase (LLC-Luc). In this work, results are also presented for the chick chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) as a tumor model. This study showed that the CAM can be used as preliminary in vivo model to study the effects of different treatments, using a simpler and faster system in which the influence of the immune system is not present and which does not require the IACUC approvals.

Gold nanoparticles as radiosensitizers demonstrated in a chick chorioallantonic membrane model

256th National Meeting (2018)

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