By Adil Ali Tariq
On the 5th of May, 2021, NPAS hosted a talk titled “Radio Enhancement using Gold Nanoparticles and Its Application in Cancer Therapy”. Our honorable guest speaker was Taha Nasir, a final year student of Physics at the School of Natural Sciences (SNS), NUST. In the session, he told us about his final year project.
The idea revolves around using the gold nanoparticles in the treatment of cancer. Cancer treatment mostly involves radiotherapy, which has severe side effects. The talk was about a phenomenon that minimizes the side effects.
Radiotherapy affects both healthy and tumor cells. Tumor cells are exclusively affected by their instinctive ability, which is due to the cell cycle abnormalities.
The device used in the technique is Lin-acc (linear accelerator), which concentrates the minimum level of radiations to induce a tumoricidal effect. The high energy photons, X-rays, traveling in the lateral direction fall on the cancerous part and are damaged.
Several phenomena are involved; Compton scattering, photoelectric effect, pair production and bremsstrahlung radiation.
Radiotherapy can be either X-ray beam therapy or electron beam therapy, both of which are different based on their energies.
The toxicity of gold-79 is much lesser in this regard. It reduces the radiolysis ability of rays, minimizing the effects of the beams.
Taha further discussed his own experience working with the cancer cells therapy. Most of his work was based in the Atta-ur-Rahman School of Applied Biosciences (ASAB), and some parts of his research were affected due to COVID-19 constraints.
In the end, Taha answered some questions asked by the audience as well.
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