Combined Photothermotherapy and Chemotherapy of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Guided by Multifunctional Nanomaterials Enhanced Photoacoustic Tomography.

Background Squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck is the sixth most common cancer worldwide, with 40% occurring in the oral cavity. Although the level of early diagnosis and treatment of OSCC has improved significantly, the five-year survival rate of advanced patients remains unsatisfactory. However, the main challenges before us are how to get an early and accurate diagnosis and how to formulate effective treatment. Nanoparticle-based chemo-photothermal therapy has proven to be a promising non-invasive approach to treating oral squamous cell carcinoma treatment. Methods In this study, we tried to design and synthesize multifunctional hyaluronic acid (HA) modified gold nanorods/mesoporous silica-based nanoparticles loaded with doxorubicin hydrochloride (DOX) for photoacoustic imaging (PAI) guided cooperative chemo-photothermal therapy. Results The resultant nanocomposite shows favorable biocompatibility, relatively low cytotoxicity, ideal drug loading capability and strong PAI signals. In addition, they showed an excellent photothermal conversion efficiency of 49.02% for photothermal therapy (PTT). Moreover, in vivo and in vitro experiments have shown that synergistic chemo-photothermal therapy has better therapeutic effects than chemotherapy alone or PTT (P < 0.05). After being injected into the CAL-27 tumor-bearing mice, the DOX-AuNRs@mSiO2-HA nanoparticles could accumulate rapidly at the tumor sites and achieve complete ablation of tumors when combined with near-infrared laser irradiation, without obvious side effects on normal tissues. Conclusion Our research provides a solid demonstration of the potential of DOX-AuNRs@mSiO2-HA as a multifunctional platform in PAI-guided photothermal chemotherapy for oral squamous cell carcinoma.