Dual Effects of Titania Nanoparticle (TNP) Combination Treatment with a Chemodrug, Cisplatin Targeting for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Abstract

Standard treatment for progressive nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is chemo drug cisplatin (CDDP) as the sole treatment or adjuvant with chemoradiation. Integrating CDDP with the nanosystem has become a current research interest to enhance the effectiveness of chemo drug therapy for NPC. Nanoparticles such as titania nanoparticles (TNP) possessed higher adsorption properties into cells remarkably from the large surface area. Present work studied the combination treatment of TNP and CDDP towards nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) cell lines models. The half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of CDDP and TNP were characterized on NPC cells, respectively. Further optimizations of the CDDP-TNP dual effect were studied, especially on the cytotoxic profile. The combined treatment of CDDP and TNP was more effective than a single treatment at inhibiting NPC cells by more than 60 %. On the other hand, this combined therapy had dual effects and was highly dependent on the dose of TNP exposed after 24-h exposure. This study suggested that the combination treatment of CDDP and TNP on NPC cells would improve the therapeutic outcomes even at lower concentrations of CDDP, thus could overcome the limitation of current cancer therapy in a future application.