Targeted delivery of gold nanoparticles by neural stem cells to glioblastoma for enhanced radiation therapy: a review

Glioblastoma (GB) is the most malignant subtype of brain cancer derived from astrocytes in the brain. Radiotherapy is one of the standard treatments for GB patients, but its effectiveness is often limited by the radioresistance of aggressive GB cells. Higher dose of radiation needs to be applied to GB patients to eliminate these stubborn cells, but this also means more side effects on the adjacent healthy cells because the radiation beam could indistinguishably harm all cells exposed to it. In order to address this problem, various strategies have been studied to enhance the radiosensitivity among the radioresistant cell populations for targeted eradication of GB without harming other surrounding healthy cells. One of the promising strategies for radiosensitization is to use gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) which can enhance photoelectric effects within the radioresistant cells for higher killing efficiency even at low doses of radiation. Nonetheless, there is no evidence showing the capability of these nanoparticles to travel to brain tumor cells, therefore, the application of this nanotechnology is very much dependent on the development of a suitable carrier to deliver the AuNPs to the GB tumor sites specifically. In this review article, we discussed the potentials of neural stem cells (NSCs) as biological carriers to carry AuNPs to targeted GB tumor sites and provided new insights into the potential of NSC-based targeted delivery system for GB treatment. The information reported here may pave a new direction for clinical transformation of next-generation nanoparticle-assisted radiotherapy to optimize the efficacy of radiotherapy for GB treatment.