Optical study of chemotherapy efficiency in cancer treatment via intracellular structural disorder analysis using partial wave spectroscopy

Abstract

As cancer progresses, macromolecules, such as DNA, RNA or lipids, inside cells undergo spatial structural rearrangements and alterations. Mesoscopic light transport-based optical partial wave spectroscopy (PWS) was recently introduced to quantify changes in the nanoscale structural disorder in biological cells. The PWS measurement is performed using a parameter termed as "disorder strength" (L ), which represents the degree of nanoscale structural disorder inside the cells. It was shown that cancerous cells have higher disorder strength than normal cells. In this work, we first used the PWS to analyze the hierarchy of different types of prostate cancer cells, namely, C4-2, DU-145 and PC-3, by quantifying their average disorder strengths. Results expectedly showed that L values increases in accordance with the increasing aggressiveness/tumorigenicity levels of these cells. Using the L parameter, we then analyzed the chemoresistance properties of these prostate cancer cells to docetaxel drug compared to their chemosensitivity. Results show that chemoresistant cancer cells have increased L values, that is, higher disorder strength, relative to chemosensitive cancer cells. Thus, use of the L metric can be effective in determining the efficacy of particular chemotherapy.

Optical detection of the structural properties of tumor tissue generated by xenografting of drug-sensitive and drug-resistant cancer cells using partial wave spectroscopy (PWS)

“…PWS detects the nanoscale structural alteration in the cells/tissues and can distinguish the different levels and effect of drug in the tumorous cells/tissues [7,10]. Among the different types of cancer, prostate cancer is a major concern of public health at present because of its low survival rate.…”

“…Since the disorder strength increases with the increase in the level of tumorigenicity, which implies chemotherapy resistant cells are more aggressive than drug-sensitive cancerous cells. Cells from the prostate or any other cancerous region that survived through drug exposure are more aggressive and develop with the cell line's hierarchy as: PC-3 > DU145 [10]. As an application of the developed finer focusing PWS technique, we have studied the structural alteration in the xenografted tissue morphology that are grown in 3D environment from single cells that mainly have 2D structure.…”

“…which result in increasing aggressiveness which in turn increases the disorder strength. PWS technique was successfully used to study the effect of chemotherapy drugs on cancerous cells and to quantitatively measure the disorder strength of drug-sensitive and drug-resistant cancerous cells [10].…”

“…At present, chemotherapy is the only way to treat metastasized prostate cancer, however, it is often found ineffective due to an individual patient's chemo-resistance that leads to tumor progression [10][11][12][13]. The PWS studies of cancer cell lines have shown some promising success in distinguishing the hierarchy and drug effectiveness based on the disorder strength Ld parameter, however, these studies were mainly focused on backscattering signals from isolated cancer cells where the cells were grown in 2D on glass slides.…”

Spectroscopic Study on Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Biofilm in the Presence of the Aptamer-DNA Scaffolded Silver Nanoclusters

“…The nano-clustering properties of the nanomaterials were characterized by using optical spectroscopy which includes fluorescence and circular dichroism studies on the Ag-NC. The properties of biofilm formation/non-formation by the bacteria in the presence of Ag-NCs were characterized by using the partial wave spectroscopy (PWS) [ 26 , 27 ] on the PA biofilms with Ag-NC. The highly sensitive spectroscopic microscopy PWS technique allowed us to observe and characterize the biofilm in PA cells in absence of Ag-NC at the nanoscale, and study the prevention of the film formation directly in the presence of different Ag-NCs.…”