On-demand intracellular amplification of chemoradiation with cancer-specific plasmonic nanobubbles

Chemoradiation-resistant cancers limit treatment efficacy and safety. We show here the cancer cell-specific, on-demand intracellular amplification of chemotherapy and chemoradiation therapy via gold nanoparticle- and laser pulse-induced mechanical intracellular impact. Cancer aggressiveness promotes the clustering of drug nanocarriers and gold nanoparticles in cancer cells. This cluster, upon exposure to a laser pulse, generates a plasmonic nanobubble, the mechanical explosion that destroys the host cancer cell or ejects the drug into its cytoplasm by disrupting the liposome and endosome. The same cluster locally amplifies external X-rays. Intracellular synergy of the mechanical impact of plasmonic nanobubble, ejected drug and amplified X-rays improves the efficacy of standard chemoradiation in resistant and aggressive head and neck cancer by 100-fold in vitro and 17-fold in vivo, reduces the effective entry doses of drugs and X-rays to 2-6% of their clinical doses and efficiently spares normal cells. The developed quadrapeutics technology combines four clinically validated components and transforms a standard macrotherapy into an intracellular on-demand theranostic microtreatment with radically amplified therapeutic efficacy and specificity.