Confocal Raman Microscopy to image targeted chemotherapy
Résumé
The Side effects of chemotherapy in cancer treatments are unavoidable due to the lack of anticancer drug’s specificity and it has a painful impact on patient quality of life. Over the past 30 years, increasing efforts is done to optimize chemotherapy dosing to reduce drug toxicity while increasing its efficacy. A new study proves stem cells can act as a drug reservoir and they will release anticancer drug in its original form in nearby area of cancer cells. Stem cells, due to their capacity to uptake drug, can control the drug toxicity. Dental Pulp Stem Cells DPSCs are able to uptake Paclitaxel PTX and could release it in the culture medium gradually. The conditioned culture medium (culture medium plus released PTX from DPSC) is transferred to the breast cancer cells MCF7. Visualizing the drug uptake intracellular could provide us mechanism of action of the drug. Confocal Raman microscopy as a noninvasive label free method is being used to trace drugs intracellular [1,2]. Applying Confocal Raman Microscopy, anticancer drug uptake by MCF7 is imaged. Surprisingly MCF7 - without any direct contact with PTX- showed drug uptake. It proves the stem cells carry and deliver anticancer drug without its modification. It could be a revolution in chemotherapy to avoid the side effects and increase the drug efficacy.
[1] H. Salehi et al. Label-free detection of anticancer drug paclitaxel in living cells by Confocal Raman Microscopy. Applied physics letter. 2013, 102, 113701.
[2] H. Salehi et al. Confocal Raman data analysis to comparison of apoptotic and non-apoptotic MCF-7 cells caused by anticancer drug paclitaxel. Journal of Biomedical Optics. 2013,18(5), 056010.