Hyperthermia in Cancer Therapy with Gold Nanoparticles: New Approaches to the Treatment

Abstract

Hyperthermia, a little increase in tumour temperature, increases the sensitivity of
cancer cells to radiation and chemotherapy. Getting there isn't easy, and the tried-and-true
ways have their limitations. To get around some of the problems and produce tumour
hyperthermia, it is possible to load tumours with energy-transducing nanoparticles that are
systematically administered. However, there are distinct obstacles that nanoparticles must
overcome before they can be used in clinical settings. Nanorods and gold nanoshells,
superparamagnetic iron oxide particles, and carbon nanotubes are the three main nanoparticle
formulations discussed in this article, which also provides a brief overview of the present
technological state of the art. Nevertheless, hyperthermia's clinical potential remains
unfulfilled, despite its promise in cancer management. This is so for a number of reasons.
Traditional approaches to attaining global hyperthermia lacked standardisation, specificity, and
were inherently laborious. Even newer ways of producing hyperthermia can be intrusive and
cause uneven heating inside tumours and, in rare cases, hot areas in healthy tissues around
them. Thanks to injectable nanoparticles like SPIONs, GNSs, and CNTs, ablative temperatures
may now be achieved inside highly localised regions of the body while other sections remain at
normal or near-normal temperatures. This is a major breakthrough. As an alternative to the
more conventional methods of tumour hyperthermia, nanoparticles show great promise. The
use of nanoparticles in tumour hyperthermia is not without its obstacles, though. The
consistency and sufficiency of nanoparticle buildup at the tumour site is a big concern. It is still
challenging to achieve homogeneous temperature across the tumor's core and mantle, even
with incredibly tiny nanoparticles. The centre of a tumour that is little vascularized is not an
ideal place for nanoparticles to enter consistently. Finding ways to uniformly raise temperature
in the core requires investigating other possibilities. The problem of quality control is a further
obstacle to the clinical translation of nanoparticles. Size and compositional differences within
and between batches of laboratory-made nanoparticles are common. The likelihood of variance
grows in direct proportion to the increasing complexity of nanoparticle compositions. Usually,
the zetasizer or another dynamic light scattering device is used to determine the nanoparticle
size distribution, but this method only gives an approximation of the hydrodynamic radius and
not the nanoparticles' true diameter.