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Biodegradable magnesium nanoparticle-enhanced laser hyperthermia therapy

Authors Wang, Xie, He, Di, Liu J

Received 11 June 2012

Accepted for publication 19 July 2012

Published 28 August 2012 Volume 2012:7 Pages 4715—4725

DOI https://doi.org/10.2147/IJN.S34902

Checked for plagiarism Yes

Review by Single anonymous peer review

Peer reviewer comments 4



Qian Wang,1 Liping Xie,1 Zhizhu He,2 Derui Di,2 Jing Liu1,2

1Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, 2Key Laboratory of Cryogenics, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People's Republic of China

Background: Recently, nanoparticles have been demonstrated to have tremendous merit in terms of improving the treatment specificity and thermal ablation effect on tumors. However, the potential toxicity and long-term side effects caused by the introduced nanoparticles and by expelling them out of the body following surgery remain a significant challenge. Here, we propose for the first time to directly adopt magnesium nanoparticles as the heating enhancer in laser thermal ablation to avoid these problems by making full use of the perfect biodegradable properties of this specific material.
Methods: To better understand the new nano “green” hyperthermia modality, we evaluated the effects of magnesium nanoparticles on the temperature transients inside the human body subject to laser interstitial heating. Further, we experimentally investigated the heating enhancement effects of magnesium nanoparticles on a group of biological samples: oil, egg white, egg yolk, in vitro pig tissues, and the in vivo hind leg of rabbit when subjected to laser irradiation.
Results: Both the theoretical simulations and experimental measurements demonstrated that the target tissues injected with magnesium nanoparticles reached much higher temperatures than tissues without magnesium nanoparticles. This revealed the enhancing behavior of the new nanohyperthermia method.
Conclusion: Given the unique features of magnesium nanoparticles – their complete biological safety and ability to enhance heating – which most other advanced metal nanoparticles do not possess, the use of magnesium nanoparticles in hyperthermia therapy offers an important “green” nanomedicine modality for treating tumors. This method has the potential to be used in clinics in the near future.

Keywords: laser thermal therapy, heating enhancer, biodegradability, nanohyperthermia, bioheat transfer

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