Hyderabad: A combination therapy for treatment of cancer using photo thermal and chemotherapy to destroy cancer cells has been developed by researchers from IIT Hyderabad, University of Hyderabad, IIT Bombay and Bose Institute, Kolkata.
The combination therapy combines therapeutic procedure for treatment of cancer cells in addition to the therapy of medicines. The research was published in the journal Nanoscale.
The crux of the research was to use effective therapies only for the cancer tissues, and they must be non toxic to the healthy cells.
The present methods of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy continue to have adverse side-effects on healthy organs and surrounding cells of the tumours. This is the major drawback of cancer treatments.
The researchers found that therapies such as photothermal and CFAC therapy promised significant therapeutic benefits with minimal or no side effects.
The research team used liposomes – lipid nanoparticles a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of a single human hair – as the carriers for IR780 because of their low toxicity, flexibility, biocompatibility, bio-degradability and non-immunogenicity.
The team loaded liposomes not only with IR780 but also with an anticancer agent extracted from the plant Anthocephalous Cadamba. These liposomes were tested against human breast cancer cells that were introduced into mice groups. The laboratory procedures showed that reactive oxygen species brought down the rate of cell death and the healthy cells were free of side effects.
The research was led at IIT Hyderabad by Dr Aravind Kumar Rengan, Assistant Professor, Department of Bio-Medical Engineering, IIT Hyderabad.
The paper was co-authored by Tejaswini Appidi, Deepak Bharadwaj Pemmaraju, Rafiq Ahmad Khan, Syed Baseeruddin Alvi, Rohit Srivastava, Mahadeb Pal, Nooruddin Khan and Dr Aravind Kumar Rengan.
