Raman spectroscopy detects biomolecular changes associated with nanoencapsulated hesperetin treatment in experimental oral carcinogenesis

Abstract

Recently it has been shown that Raman spectroscopy possesses great potential in the investigation of biomolecular changes of tumor tissues with therapeutic drug response in a non-invasive and label-free manner. The present study is designed to investigate the antitumor effect of hespertin-loaded nanoparticles (HETNPs) relative to the efficacy of native hesperetin (HET) in modifying the biomolecular changes during 7,12-dimethyl benz(a)anthracene (DMBA)-induced oral carcinogenesis using a Raman spectroscopic technique. Significant differences in the intensity and shape of the Raman spectra between the control and the experimental tissues at 1800–500 cm−1 were observed. Tumor tissues are characterized by an increase in the relative amount of proteins, nucleic acids, tryptophan and phenylalanine and a decrease in the percentage of lipids when compared to the control tissues. Further, oral administration of HET and its nanoparticulates restored the status of the lipids and significantly decreased the levels of protein and nucleic acid content. Treatment with HETNPs showed a more potent antitumor effect than treatment with native HET, which resulted in an overall reduction in the intensity of several biochemical Raman bands in DMBA-induced oral carcinogenesis being observed. Principal component and linear discriminant analysis (PC–LDA), together with leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) on Raman spectra yielded diagnostic sensitivities of 100%, 80%, 91.6% and 65% and specificities of 100%, 65%, 60% and 55% for classification of control versus DMBA, DMBA versus DMBA + HET, DMBA versus DMBA + HETNPs and DMBA + HET versus DMBA + HETNPs treated tissue groups, respectively. These results further demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy associated with multivariate statistical algorithms could be a valuable tool for developing a comprehensive understanding of the process of biomolecular changes, and could reveal the signatures of the antitumor response of drugs.