Abstract
Conventional therapies to treat cancer often exhibit low specificity, reducing the efficiency of the treatment and promoting strong side effects. To overcome these drawbacks, new ways to fight cancer cells have been developed so far focusing on nanosystems. Different action mechanisms to fight cancer cells have been explored using nanomaterials, being their remote activation one of the most promising. Photo- and sonodynamic therapies are relatively new approaches that emerged following this idea. These therapies are based on the ability of specific agents to generate highly cytotoxic reactive oxygen species (ROS) by external stimulation with light or ultrasounds (US), respectively. Crystalline (TiO2) and amorphous titania (a-TiO2) nanoparticles (NPs) present a set of very interesting characteristics, such as their photo-reactivity, photo stability, and effective bactericidal properties. Their production is inexpensive and easily scalable; they are reusable and demonstrated already to be nontoxic. Therefore, these NPs have been increasingly studied as promising photo- or sonosensitizers to be applied in photodynamic/sonodynamic therapies in the future. However, they suffer from poor colloidal stability in aqueous and biological relevant media. Therefore, various organic and polymer-based coatings have been proposed. In this work, the role of a-TiO2 based NPs synthesized through a novel, room-temperature, base-catalyzed, sol-gel protocol in the generation of ROS and as an enhancer of acoustic inertial cavitation was evaluated under ultrasound irradiation. A novel biomimetic coating based on double lipidic bilayer, self-assembled on the a-TiO2-propylamine NPs, is proposed to better stabilize them in water media. The obtained results show that the biomimetic a-TiO2-propylamine NPs are promising candidates to be US responding agents, since an improvement of the cavitation effect occurs in presence of the developed NPs. Further studies will show their efficacy against cancer cells.
Highlights
Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide
NPs//DOPC-dioleoyl3-trimethylammonium propane (DOTAP) (a-TiO2 NPs coupled with the cationic lipid formulation DOPC-DOTAP) were prepared, characterized, and evaluated as sonosensitizers
Amorphous TiO2 based NPs have been structurally characterized by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), X-ray Powder Diffraction (XRD), and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) by
Summary
Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. This disease corresponds to a rapid and uncontrolled abnormal cell growth and can affect any part of the body. Today cancer therapy strategies lack specificity, the development of safer and more efficient systems for chemotherapeutics delivery and/or new treatment methodologies is of great importance. The design and development of novel tailor-made nanosystems allow for accurate strategies to eliminate cancer cells by selective accumulation of systematically administered chemotherapeutics. Extensive research has been accomplished to make the transport of the chemotherapeutic agents even more precise, minimizing the collateral harmful effects on healthy tissues [8,9,10]
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