Photothermal therapy (PTT) has been studied as a minimal-invasive and effective treatment for prostate cancer. However, PTT has disadvantages, such as inadequate treatment and severe thermal injury to normal tissue. In this study, PTT was conjugated with photodynamic therapy (PDT) to improve treatment effect by covering untreated region of PTT and targeting specific cancer tissue. For PTT-PDT, 808nm laser was irradiated at 0.8W/cm2 for 5 min. To evaluate the experimental conditions, MTT, ROS assay, and annexin V-FITC/PI staining were conducted in in vitro tests. DU145-bearing mice models were treated and monitored for two weeks to confirm the feasibility of PTT-PDT. Then, histological and protein expression level were analyzed. As a result, PTT-PDT showed a steadily decreasing survival rate for 24 hr with a lower viability due to two types of cell death (necrosis and apoptosis) after the immediate necrosis. In the in vivo tests, PTT-PDT showed the lowest tumor growth rate for monitoring a 24% wider therapeutic area, compared to PTT. In addition, the apoptosis-related protein expression of PTT-PDT was more than 55% higher than PTT. In conclusion, the current study demonstrated that PTT-PDT enhanced therapeutic effect by complementing the incompletely treated region of PTT through the distant apoptosis of PDT. For clinical applications, further studies will be conducted to analyze the post-treatment of PTT-PDT and to improve the selectivity of photosensitizers.
|