Cancer Tissue Classification, Associated Therapeutic Implications and PDT as an Alternative

Abstract

Carcinogenesis occurs via mutation of critical genes conferring enhanced survival and protection to the ensuing tissue. Current therapies in use garner success due to their specificity for certain intracellular targets. This particularity, whist beneficial in identifying tumorigenic from normal tissue states, is limited by the variations in geno/phenotypic profiles displayed between tumor tissue types. As such, tissue-specific therapeutic combinations and adjuvants are often required for adequate effect, but present symptomatic complications and occasionally generate secondary carcinogenesis displaying multi-drug resistance (MDR). An accumulation of research over the recent years has suggested that photodynamic therapy (PDT) with macrocycle photosensitizers are a promising alternative. Its administration method and toxicity mechanism present attractive features for potentially overcoming MDR cancers of multiple tissue origins with limited symptomatic onsets. Herein, we highlight these potentials as referenced against existing therapeutics and consider the impact of macrocycle-PDT for broad spectrum application regardless of tumorigenic resistance profiles.

Novel multi-omics deconfounding variational autoencoders can obtain meaningful disease subtyping

“…Furthermore, squamous differentiation is by far the most common histological variant of urothelial carcinoma [14], indicating a close relationship between urothelial carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. Apart from BLCA, the overlap in clustering of LUSC and HNSC can be directly explained by their common origin of squamous cells, while BRCA, THCA, and KIRC are all carcinoma related to glandular cells [13]. Supporting the validity of our obtained cXVAE clustering, other multi-omics pan-cancer studies utilising stacked variational autoencoders [27], penalized matrix factorization [12], or supervised VAE [31] have retrieved similar cancer type clustering.…”

Current Photodynamic Therapy for Glioma Treatment: An Update

“…Unfortunately, these methods are often associated with difficulties resulting from incomplete tumor resection and recurrence [22][23][24]. In such situations, photodynamic therapy (PDT) is becoming increasingly popular as an advanced therapeutic strategy, characterized by fewer side effects, minimal toxicity, and more controlled treatment [24][25][26]. The first studies on the use of PDT in high-grade gliomas showed promising results, such as increasing the median survival and extending the 2-year survival of patients from 18% to 28% [27][28][29][30][31].…”

Enhanced photodynamic therapy/photothermo therapy for nasopharyngeal carcinoma via a tumour microenvironment-responsive self-oxygenated drug delivery system

“…Traditional cancer therapy has many limitations, including unsatisfactory bioavailability, drug resistance, and side effects such as myelosuppression, gastrointestinal reactions and auditory neurotoxicity. Notably, photodynamic therapy (PDT), as a highly efficacious alternative or supplement to routine cancer treatment, has several unique advantages, including non-invasiveness, remote spatiotemporal control and facile application [8] , [9] , [10] . It uses light-activated photosensitisers to generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) under infrared light irradiation at a specific wavelength, thereby causing irreversible damage to tumour cells [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] .…”