Abstract
Lung cancer has been established as one of the world’s leading causes of cancer related deaths (Siegel et al., 2018). Moreover, it is expected that the lung cancer mortality rate will increase by up to 3 million cases by 2035 (Sadanala et al., 2012). Thus current research has been focused on enhancing unconventional treatment modalities such as photodynamic therapy (PDT), due to the adverse side effects commonly linked with conventional lung cancer treatments (chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery) (Mokwena et al., 2018). Unconventional treatments such as PDT, carry the potential to be specifically targeted and are actively absorbed by tumour cells alone, leaving normal surrounding tissues unharmed, with limited side effects post-treatment (Master and Sen Gupta, 2012).
PDT is a clinically approved cancer therapy, which is based on 3 fundamental factors, namely light, oxygen and photosensitizer (PS) drug (van Straten et al., 2018). These factors come together to bring about tumour destruction by exposing the PS drug administered to light of specific wavelength, thus stimulating the production of ROS (van Straten et al., 2018). However, the efficacy of ROS production for tumour damage is highly dependent on the uptake of the PS in tumour cells (El Hussein et al., 2015). Thus PS selective or targeted uptake and delivery in tumour cells is a crucial factor in PDT cancer drug absorption studies. Generally, within non-targeted drug delivery mechanisms, only small amounts of PS is able to passively accumulate in tumour sites due to the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect and the remainder distributes into healthy tissues, causing unwanted side effects (Kawczyk-Krupka et al., 2016). This study sought to improve the efficacy of PDT by developing a actively specific receptor based photosynthetic nanocarrier drug which would promote the active uptake and absorption of PS drugs in tumour sites only, avoiding these unwanted side effects...
M.Tech. (Biomedical Technology)