Jonathan A. Coulter

TL;DR: The sensitization was cell-specific with comparable effects at kV and MV energies, no increase in DSB formation, and GNP chemopotentiation with bleomycin, suggesting a possible biological mechanism of radiosensitization.

TL;DR: The first calculations which take into account the structure of energy deposition in the nanoscale vicinity of GNPs and relate this to biological outcomes are presented, and show for the first time good agreement with experimentally observed cell killing by the combination of X-rays and GNPs.

TL;DR: This is the first study involving 1.9 nm nanometre sized particles to report multiple cellular responses which impact on the radiation dose modifying effect, and highlights the need for extensive characterization of responses to gold nanoparticles when assessing dose enhancing potential in cancer therapy.

TL;DR: It is suggested that GNP radiosensitisation is driven by inhomogeneities in dose on the nanoscale, rather than changes in dose over the entire cell, which may contribute to the similar radiosensItisation observed in megavoltage and kilovoltage experiments.

TL;DR: Gold nanoparticle uptake was preferentially observed in tumor cells, resulting in an increased expression of cleaved caspase proteins and an accumulation of cells in sub G1 phase, and gold nanoparticle cytotoxicity remained low, with immortalized normal cells exhibiting an LD50 concentration approximately 14 times higher than tumor cells.