Abstract
This review is focused on a novel cellular probe, the plasmonic nanobubble (PNB), which has the dynamically tunable and multiple functions of imaging, diagnosis, delivery, therapy and, ultimately, theranostics. The concept of theranostics was recently introduced in order to unite the clinically important stages of treatment, namely diagnosis, therapy and therapy guidance, into one single, rapid and highly accurate procedure. Cell level theranostics will have far-reaching implications for the treatment of cancer and other diseases at their earliest stages. PNBs were developed to support cell level theranostics as a new generation of on-demand tunable cellular probes. A PNB is a transient vapor nanobubble that is generated within nanoseconds around an overheated plasmonic nanoparticle with a short laser pulse. In the short term, we expect that PNB technology will be rapidly adaptable to clinical medicine, where the single cell resolution it provides will be critical for diagnosing incipient or residual disease and eliminating cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells intact. This review discusses mechanisms of plasmonic nanobubbles and their biomedical applications with the focus on cancer cell theranostics.
Highlights
Modern cancer research and treatment have several principal challenges
plasmonic nanobubble (PNB) were detected in individual living cells as two simultaneous optical signals: a time-resolved optical scattering image with a pulsed probe laser (Figure 8c and 8g) and a time-response that showed the dynamics of the growth and collapse of the PNB (Figure 8d and 8h)
We found that intact cells cannot support such small non-lethal PNBs (Table 3) and that the generation of photothermal laser-induced bubbles was always associated with cell damage [108,109,110,111], suggesting that the endogenous optical absorbers in intact cells cannot generate small PNBs
Summary
Modern cancer research and treatment have several principal challenges. The first barrier in current clinical practice is the separation of diagnosis, therapy and therapy guidance into three independent stages. Nanotechnologies were employed to address the above problems, but, despite the promise of the properties of nanoparticles, they still often use macroscale, rather than nanoscale processes and methods This can be seen from the diagnostic and therapeutic applications of gold nanoparticles where the diagnosis is supported by optical scattering and the treatment is due to photothermally induced hyperthermia. We hypothesized that by combining the photothermal properties of plasmonic (gold) nanoparticles with the mechanical and optical properties of transient vapor nanobubbles we could produce a tunable theranostic probe. This probe is not a nanoparticle (NP) but an NP-generated event, a plasmonic nanobubble (PNB). (e) plasmonic NPs accumulate the heat that is generated during the collapse of a nannobubble and prevent the collapse-related effects on the NP environment
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