Cancer Treatment Using Nano-Particles: Understanding Hyperthermia at Cell-level

Author: levan shoshiashvili
Co-authors: D.Kakulia,A.Lomia,F.Shubitidze
Keywords: nano particles, hypertermia, bioheat, vernotte-cattaneo model
Annotation:

One of the most challenging, until now not satisfactorily solved problems of modern medicine is cancer. Though the standard therapies based on surgery, chemotherapy, irradiation, or combinations of them steadily improve there are many attempts with a multitude of alternative therapy concepts among which different types of hyperthermia have already entered into clinical practice (for a review on hyperthermia in oncology. Recently, nano-particles (NP) hyperthermia emerged as one of most promising technologies for treatment of cancers at cell level. Studies show that cancer cells accept and accumulate NP more preferable than normal cells. The mechanism of nano- scale hyperthermia and temperature distribution at cell level is not clear and needs numerical and experimental studies to further optimizing NP hyperthermia for treatment of all kind tumor cells. To address these issues, in this project we propose: to develop multi-scale (nano-micro-macro) code for solving bio-heat equation; to validate the code by comparing the numerical code to the experimental data; to study NP hyperthermia at nano-scale; and to determine feasibility of temperature focusing at cell level for treatment of individual tumor cells.