DOI: 10.5176/2301-3516_OPAP16.16
Authors: Nur Shafawati binti Rosli, Azhar Abdul Rahman, Azlan Abdul Aziz and Shaharum Shamsuddin
Abstract:
In treating cancer, radiation therapy and chemotherapy remain the most widely used treatment options. Recent developments in cancer research show that therapy combined with metallic nanoparticles is a new way to treat cancer, in which gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are injected through intravenous administration and bound to tumor sites has enhanced tumor cell killing. Radiotherapy aims to deliver a high therapeutic dose of ionizing radiation to the tumor without exceeding normal tissue tolerance. The use of AuNPs in megavoltage photon beams radiotherapy will provide a high probability for photon interaction by Compton interaction. These provide advantages in terms of radiation dose enhancement. In Compton interaction, a relatively high energy photon interacts with a loosely bound electron in an atom’s outer shell which is also called as free electron. In this work, breast cancer cell lines (MCF-7) are seeded in the 96-well plate and were treated with 13 nm, 50 nm and 70 nm AuNPs before they were irradiated with 6 MV photon beam from a medical linear accelerator at various radiation doses. To validate the enhanced killing effect, both with and without AuNPs MCF-7 cells is irradiated simultaneously. By comparison, the results show that AuNPs significantly enhance cancer killing and the enhancement radiation effect was dependent on the size of AuNPs.
Keywords: AuNPs; MCF-7 cells; megavoltage; Compton.
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