Innate immune activation by conditioned medium of cancer cells following combined phototherapy with photosensitizer-loaded gold nanorods.

Nanoparticle-based phototherapy has evolved to include immunotherapy as an effective treatment combination for cancers through inducing anti-cancer immune activation leading to downstream adaptive responses and immune protection. However, most cancer phototherapy studies that claimed anti-cancer immunogenic effects often included exogenous immunostimulants to potentiate immune responses and did not clearly establish their effects on immune cells. In this study, we showed that combined photodynamic (PDT) and photothermal therapy (PTT) using gold nanorods (NRs) loaded with the photosensitizer chlorin e6 (Ce6) on endogenously formed mouse serum (MS) protein coronas (i.

Quantitative and Label-Free Detection of Protein Kinase A Activity Based on Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy with Gold Nanostars.

The activity of extracellular protein kinase A (PKA) is known to be a biomarker for cancer. However, conventional PKA assays based on colorimetric, radioactive, and fluorometric techniques suffer from intensive labeling-related preparations, background interference, photobleaching, and safety concerns. While surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)-based assays have been developed for various enzymes to address these limitations, their use in probing PKA activity is limited due to subtle changes in the Raman spectrum with phosphorylation.