Sequential photothermal therapy, and chemotherapy for treatment of Melanoma

Najim Akhtar^1*, Chuan Lin Chen², Surojit Chattopadhyay¹

¹Institute of Biophotonics, National Yang Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan
²Department of Biomedical Imaging and Radiological Sciences, National Yang Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan

* Presenter:Najim Akhtar, email:rahi.najim@gmail.com

Non-invasive treatments are becoming increasingly popular as opposed to surgery, and radiotherapy requiring prolonged recovery period. Here, we show the use of a non-invasive photothermal therapy (PTT) to enhance the effect of chemotherapy (chemo) for the treatment of melanoma bearing mice as in vivo model. For PTT, gold nanorods (AuNRs), with absorption in the infrared, was used that resulted in a temperature rise in excess of 6 °C; for chemotherapy, graphene nanocarrier was used to deliver doxorubicin (Dox) into the tumor. The internalization of the nanomaterials was confirmed by flow cytometry, and confocal fluorescence microscopy. We have performed a sequential PTT (with 785 nm laser irradiation), and chemo on melanoma bearing mice as in-vivo model, and compared the results with simultaneous PTT+Chemo. In-vivo results demonstrate a superior tumor growth inhibition index of ~80 % for the sequentially treated tumors, followed by those receiving simultaneous treatment (61 %), in comparison to the control group (untreated tumor) having a score of 0. We believe, this is due to weakening the drug resistance of the cells (in the tumor) with PTT, followed by the chemo resulting in significantly improved Dox cytotoxicity, whereas simultaneous PTT, and chemo results were dominated by the Dox alone.

Keywords: Melanoma, Photothermal therapy, Gold nanorods, Graphene Oxide, Nano-enabled drug delivery system