Combining Radiation and Hyperthermia Methods for the Vitro Cancer Treatment of Multicellular Tumor Spheroids

Radiation is a common form of cancer treatment. However, with radiation therapy comes extreme side effects for patients like hair loss, fatigue, infertility, blistering at the treatment site, nausea, and vomiting. Hyperthermia, a supplemental cancer therapeutic which exposes cells to an elevated temperature between 42-45°C, has been shown in conventional monolayer studies to enhance the effects of radiation. These 2-dimensional cell culture models are insufficient representations of in vivo tumors. 3-dimensional (3D) multicellular tumor spheroids are more appropriate in vitro models; they retain the architectural and morphological characteristics of their tumor counterparts, and are helping to bridge the gap between cell-based in vitro studies and animal studies. This investigation aims to evaluate the efficacy of radiation therapy alone and in combination with hyperthermia using a multicellular tumor spheroid model. It is hypothesized that the two will combine to reveal a synergistic effect, meaning that the combination of treatments will result in a “more-than-additive” decrease in viability compared to the modalities alone. A synergistic effect of combined treatment would indisputably prove that parallel to a high dose of radiation, a lower dosage could be used in conjunction with hyperthermia to result in the same cell death. Thus, the severity of side effects of radiation treatment could ultimately be reduced in the clinical setting, well-represented by the 3D multicellular spheroid in vitro model.