Hyperthermia generated with various energy sources including microwave has been widely studied for cancer treatment. However, the potential damage due to non-targeted heating of normal tissue is a major hurdle to its widespread application. Fullerene is a potential agent for improving cancer therapy with microwave hyperthermia but is limited by its poor solubility in water for biomedical applications. Here we report a combination therapy for enhanced cancer cell destruction by combining microwave heating with C60-PCNPs consisting of fullerene (C60) encapsulated in Pluronic F127-chitosan nanoparticles (PCNPs) with high water solubility. A cell culture dish integrated with an antenna was fabricated to generate microwave (2.4 GHz) for heating PC-3 human prostate cancer cells either with or without the C60-PCNPs. The cell viability data show that the C60-PCNCs alone have minimal cytotoxicity. The combination of microwave heating and C60-PCNPs is significantly more effective than the microwave heating alone in killing the cancer cells (7.5 versus 42.2% cell survival). Moreover, the combination of microwave heating and C60-PCNCs is significantly more destructive to the cancer cells than the combination of simple water-bath heating (with a similar thermal history of microwave heating) and C60-PCNCs (7.5 versus 32.5% survival), because the C60 in the many nanoparticles taken up by the cells can absorb the microwave energy and convert it into heat to enhance heating of the cells under microwave irradiation. These data suggest the great potential of targeted heating via fullerene for enhanced cancer treatment by microwave hyperthermia.
Molecular pharmaceutics. 2016 May 19 [Epub ahead of print]
Mingrui Sun, Asimina Kiourti, Hai Wang, Shuting Zhao, Gang Zhao, Xiongbin Lu, John L Volakis, Xiaoming He