Computationally Guided Photothermal Tumor Therapy Using Long-Circulating Gold Nanorod Antennas

Plasmonic nanomaterials have the opportunity to considerably improve the specificity of cancer ablation by i.v. homing to tumors and acting as antennas for accepting externally applied energy. Here, we describe an integrated approach to improved plasmonic therapy composed of multimodal nanomaterial optimization and computational irradiation protocol development. We synthesized polyethylene glycol (PEG)-protected gold nanorods (NR) that exhibit superior spectral bandwidth, photothermal heat generation per gram of gold, and circulation half-life in vivo (t(1/2), approximately 17 hours) compared with the prototypical tunable plasmonic particles, gold nanoshells, as well as approximately 2-fold higher X-ray…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• RU
  Rice University
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• UF
  U.S. Food and Drug Administration
• NC
  National Cancer Institute