Cancer is an immensely complex disease to treat. The number of mutations and combinations of mutations that can lead to its development make each “cure” more of a patch to a few specific cases. Couple that with the increasing rate of mutation within cancer cells, and it becomes difficult to even diagnose the issue. Plasmon therapy offers the potential for a broadly applicable treatment, and because it couples well with the bodies immune response, offers a therapy that could decrease the chance for metastatic tumor development.
Before we discuss this topic with greater specificity, a few terms should be defined. Plasmons, from the word plasma, are a material that has electrons that flow back and forth in a wave when light shines on them. Plasmas are just gaseous ions, like lightning or neon signs, and in the case of a plasmon, this plasma is confined to the surface of a nanoparticle. You can read more about plasmon theory here.
Nanoparticles abound in modern technologies and are defined by one dimension, the so called “critical dimension”, which is around two hundred nanometers. For reference, that’s roughly one hundred thousand times smaller than a human hair. This size can afford a variety of unique properties to a molecule: distinct colors, uncharacteristic electronic activities, and even the ability to move through a cellular membrane. All these attributes will come into play in how these molecules interact with cancer cells, so they’re important to keep in mind. Plasmons are nanoparticles that are so small, that the plasma on the surface can be manipulated by light. This rapid movement of plasma gives rise to heat as it collides with surface particles just as your hands generate heat rubbing together. The type of light that does this can be visible or even radio waves, meaning that very low-energy and harmless beams can be used to generate this rapid heat.
The second bit of background knowledge necessary for this discussion is: how is cancer treated in the first place? Many current cancer therapies come from small molecules roughly the size of glucose. Whether they use metals or strictly carbon, small molecule cancer therapies usually rely on interrupting one or a few cellular pathways, like DNA replication or a checkpoint before mitosis (cell splitting). One of the first nanoparticles approved for cancer therapy have been gold nanorods, which are thousands of times larger than a small molecule and have used physical rather than chemical mechanisms for therapy. To clarify, instead of changing some pathway in a cell, these nanorods can selectively heat cancer cells until the cell dies. If you were to think about this in terms of pest control, nanoparticle therapy is like burning a nest of cockroaches. In that same case, using small molecules like cisplatin would be like spraying the cockroaches with the latest bugkiller.
Extending this analogy, it’s fairly obvious that setting a fire inside someone’s body is not a good medicinal practice, so it would be fair to question how plasmon therapy might be helpful. There are two strategies for plasmon cancer therapy: precision lasers and radio waves which can pass through a body. The earliest use of plasmon cancer therapy used a fiber optic that was inserted under the skin to a location near the tumor. Then, beams of light would hit only the tumor. This has the advantage of targeted dosing, but can still be considered fairly invasive. Others have begun using plasmons that generate that intense heat with radio waves so that no procedure is necessary: simply an injection or ingestion of nanoparticles and then stepping into a radio transmitter This can be impractical if the tumor is not in a confined space. Common gold plasmonic nanoparticles would go inside all cells so healthy cells would be damaged just as easily as cancerous ones. Recent work shows that the surface of the nanoparticle can be changed so that the majority of uptake occurs by cancer cells. Cancer cell metabolism makes the charge of cancer cell membranes different from the charge of normal cell membranes, so these nanoparticles can exploit that difference to target only cancer cells.
With this targeted dosing, plasmons show promise as a noninvasive form of therapy that do not harm the patient and would be applicable to most forms of cancer. Even though the safest and most effective nanoparticles will use gold, treatment costs are currently around $1000, thereby promising a treatment that will not be prohibitively expensive for the future.
Peer edited by Kasey Skinner.
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