MIT’s new cancer therapy combines tumor destruction, chemo in single implant
The combination of phototherapy and chemotherapy could offer a more effective way to fight aggressive tumors.
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.
In hopes of expanding the treatment options for those patients, MIT researchers have designed tiny particles that can be implanted at a tumor site. These particles deliver two types of therapy: heat and chemotherapy.
This approach could avoid the side effects that often occur when chemotherapy is given intravenously, and the synergistic effect of the two therapies may extend the patient’s lifespan longer than giving one treatment at a time.
Dual-action cancer therapy
Patients with advanced tumors usually undergo a combination of treatments, including chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation.
Phototherapy is a newer treatment that involves implanting or injecting particles that are heated with an external laser. This raises the particles’ temperature enough to kill nearby tumor cells without damaging other tissue.
Current approaches to phototherapy in clinical trials use gold nanoparticles, which emit heat when exposed to near-infrared light.
The MIT team wanted to devise 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, so low-powered lasers can be used.
To create a microparticle that could deliver both cancer treatments, the researchers combined molybdenum disulfide nanosheets with either doxorubicin, a hydrophilic drug, or violacein, a hydrophobic drug.