Thanks to this optical behavior, GNRs are able to transform the absorbed energy into localized heat. This optical effect is used to develop cancer therapies as photothermal tumor destruction either by direct enough increase of selleck chemicals llc temperature or indirectly by co-adjuvant drugs, at the same time delivered by the particle, or already present and activated by the heating [5–8]. Our research group has recently developed an optical hyperthermia device based on irradiation of GNRs with a continuous wave (CW) laser in order to induce in vitro death of human brain astrocytoma cells (1321 N1) [9]. Unlike many high-energy pulsed lasers that generally

lead to particle

structure changes and ablation in a very short time, CW lasers allow heat dissipation from particles to surrounding medium (via phonon-phonon relaxation), so they are an appropriate choice in order to use the produced heat for the Fedratinib chemical structure cure of cancer [10]. The effectiveness of the developed method was determined by measuring changes in cell viability after laser irradiation of cells in the presence of GNRs. In accordance to other results in comparable experiments [11–13], ours indicated that continuous laser irradiation in the presence of the particles induced a significant decrease in cell viability, while no decrease in cell viability was observed with laser irradiation or incubation with GNRs alone. Due to the limited capacity of laser penetration in tissues, this method could be used in clinical practice as an additional aid to surgery

for removing brain tumors completely. After this proof of concept, our objective was focused in getting a better understanding about the working principles and physical behavior of optical hyperthermia devices. It is not very common to find GPX6 studies including a comprehensive characterization about the global phenomena in optical hyperthermia systems. Moreover, although now there are a huge variety of noble metal nanoparticles that can be used to carry out this kind of therapy, an absolute control about their behavior still does not exist. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a series of characterization and modeling processes to increase the effectiveness of the hyperthermia treatments, thanks to the prediction of the system response. With this aim, a method to calculate the thermal parameters of the system and the photothermal transduction efficiency for different kinds of nanoparticles has been developed. This method, which allows an easy and effective thermal characterization and so predicts the thermal behavior of the system, is not only valid for our device but also for any kind of optical hyperthermia system.