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Photothermal Therapy Essay

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Photothermal Therapy with Gold Nanoparticles as a Treatment for Epithelial Carcinoma Current treatment options for malignant tumors are often detrimental to healthy cells and damage internal organs while attempting to kill cancerous cells. Photodynamic therapy is a viable alternative method, as it is a form of targeted therapy that is both effective and minimally invasive. However, the current molecules used to kill cancerous cells chemically has several drawbacks, including the risk of burns from light exposure for up to thirty days. Thus, gold nanoparticles for photodynamic therapy are particularly promising due to their absorption efficiency and ability to be altered to be used with near infrared light, which can penetrate through …show more content…

They were then stained with trypan blue dye for ten minutes and images were taken with a microscope. The dead cells absorbed the dye and appeared blue in the images, allowing researchers to know how many cells were killed. Nine different light intensities were tested, from 13 W/cm2 to 64 W/cm2 . Since malignant epithelial carcinoma cells overexpress EGFR, the gold nanoparticles were more abundant with HOC cells and HSC cells than HaCaT cells. Consequently, it was found that both HOC cells and HSC cells experience cell destruction at a significantly lower intensity of light than HaCaT cells. HOC cells required a minimum of 13 W/cm2 intensity of light for any cell death to occur and HSC cells required a minimum of 19 W/cm2, while HaCaT cells required a minimum of 57 W/cm2 for any cell death to occur. The conclusion of the paper restated the benefits of the usage of gold nanoparticles, citing its flexibility of usage, and reviewed the discoveries of the experiments. It was discovered that benign cells need more than twice as much light intensity to be killed than malignant cells. Finally, it discusses how the procedure would need to be altered to be used in vivo. Since a wavelength between 650 and 900 nm would be required to penetrate even a few centimeters of tissue, the next step in research is altering the pure gold nanoparticles in order to maximize absorption. The

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