Albers Jonas, Markus Andrea, Svetlove Angelika, Kraupner Alexander, Briel Andreas, Alves Frauke, Dullin Christian
Institute for Clinical and Interventional Radiology, University Medical Center Goettingen, Göttingen, Germany.
Hamburg Unit, c/o DESY, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Notkestraße 85, Hamburg, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2025 May 30;15(1):19090. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-02560-4.
External beam radiation therapy (RT) using high energy x-rays is a commonly applied cancer treatment. A major advantage of RT is its unspecific nature which allows using RT in many cancer entities. RT however causes the well-known side effects on healthy tissue in the irradiated areas. Therefore, enhancing the efficacy of RT at the tumor site while simultaneously lowering the overall radiation dose has been a long term goal. Heavy metal-based contrast agents such as gold, hafnium, gadolinium and iodine have already been proposed as radio-enhancers and are partially in clinical trials. Here we present barium sulphate (BaSO) nanoparticles as novel radio-enhancer for RT validated in a syngenic mouse breast cancer model. We demonstrate that these particles in combination with low energy RT significantly reduced tumor growth when compared to untreated controls and tumors that received RT only. Despite the fact that the absorption probability decreases with increasing photon energy, we see a stronger anti-tumoral effect at energies around 90 keV which would allow a translation of this approach into a clinical RT setting. Due to the strong contrast of barium in computed tomography such (BaSO) nanoparticles could be used for both, better tumor delineation as well as for enhancing RT response.
使用高能X射线的外照射放射治疗（RT）是一种常用的癌症治疗方法。RT的一个主要优点是其非特异性，这使得它可用于多种癌症类型。然而，RT会对受照射区域的健康组织产生众所周知的副作用。因此，提高肿瘤部位的RT疗效，同时降低总体辐射剂量一直是一个长期目标。诸如金、铪、钆和碘等重金属基造影剂已被提议作为放射增强剂，部分正在进行临床试验。在此，我们展示硫酸钡（BaSO）纳米颗粒作为一种新型放射增强剂，已在同基因小鼠乳腺癌模型中得到验证。我们证明，与未治疗的对照组和仅接受RT的肿瘤相比，这些颗粒与低能RT联合使用可显著降低肿瘤生长。尽管吸收概率随光子能量增加而降低，但我们在90keV左右的能量下看到了更强的抗肿瘤效果，这将使这种方法能够转化为临床RT设置。由于硫酸钡在计算机断层扫描中有很强的对比度，此类（BaSO）纳米颗粒可用于更好地勾勒肿瘤轮廓以及增强RT反应。
