Professor Lee Dong-yoon from the Department of Bioengineering developed a new brain tumor treatment that can enhance the efficiency of the gold nanoparticle-based photodynamic therapy(PDT), according to Hanyang University on January 27. The new high-efficiency photodynamic therapy allows oral drug absorption, which increases convenience and is expected to be applicable to photodynamic therapies that have limits in deep tissue penetration.
Brain tumors are cancers that occur in the center of the brain and are surrounded by skulls and normal tissues, making it difficult to transfer light energy for treatment. For this reason, surgical surgery has performed brain tumor tissue resection, opened the skull, and proceeded with optical treatment. However, the treatment could not be repeated, thus solutions were needed to overcome it.
Professor Lee's team discovered for the first time that if photodynamic treatments are mounted on the surface of gold nanoparticles, the excitation energy of photodynamic treatments mounted on the surface can be increased by about 1.6 times to generate more active oxygen as a resonance effect of the gold nanoparticle plasmon. The research team named the phenomenon "Metal-enhanced ROS generation(MERos)."
In the following experiments, Professor Lee's team injected oral treatment of gold nanoparticle-based photodynamic treatments to brain tumor lesions, and sufficient free oxygen was generated even without opening the skull to reduce brain tumor tissue by more than 85%.
This study is significant in that it has developed nanopharmaceuticals that can increase the generation efficiency of active oxygen of existing optical treatments, enabling optical treatment for tumors located deep in the body, such as pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, and brain tumors.
The study was supported by ICT & Future Planning conducted by the Korea Research Foundation of the Ministry of Science and ICT. Also, it was published on the 4th in the Journal of Nanobiotechnology(IF=10.435), a world-class journal in the field of biomaterials and medical engineering.
Hanyang University Department of Bioengineering doctorate student Kim Hyung-sik participated as the first author of the paper(Title: A novel therapeutic strategy of multimodal nanoconjugates for state-of-state-the-art brain tumor phototherapy), while Professor Lee Dong-yoon participated as a corresponding author.
