If Christians are part of the new covenant, why should we seek to understand and apply the Old Testament? If space says anything, the Old Testament matters to God, who gave us His Word in a book. Before the gospels and Pauline epistle, early church Christians related to the Old Testament as Scripture and viewed their Christian walk as the fulfillment of the promises made to Israel from the Old Testament, which foretold of the coming of the Messiah. The first New Testament Christians understood the importance of the Old Testament; it was their bible they preached from. Just as in the early church, Christians today need the Old Testament for preaching and in which to reference and understand Christ`s purpose for why he came.
studying the effects in both environments is necessary as nanoparticles can react very differently with in vitro cells compared to how they react once inside a living body. However, there is a further step which could improve the thoroughness of this study, and that is to test the gold nanoshells on humans – different animals will metabolise and interact with such species in different ways, and so a successful test on mice is no indication that there will be the same success in humans.
Despite the lack of testing in humans, this study has still demonstrated the promise of gold nanoshells in photothermal therapy, with only 10% of cancerous cells surviving after treatment with nanoshells and NIR light. The study has also proven that gold nanoshells and NIR light are only capable of producing a photothermal effect when coupled with one another, and alone neither will produce heat great enough to destroy a tumour.
As with the multi-layered gold nanoshells, the gold chitosan nanocomposites proposed by were studied in the application of photothermal therapy. First, the optical stability of the nanocomposites was determined by measuring their NIR absorbance against time, using “bare” gold nanoparticles as a control. This test found that bare gold nanoparticles had the lowest optical stability.
Following this, both HDF (human dermal fibroblast) and HepG2 (human liver cancer) cells were treated with laser light of 817nm and one of the three gold-chitosan nanocomposites, shown in the images below.
From the images above, it can be seen clearly that laser light and gold-chitosan nanocomposites (d) were most effective at causing cell death in both cases, however it is the gold-chitosan-carboxymethylated chitosan nanocomposites (f) that give the most desirable effect, as they destroyed almost all of the liver cancer cells but less than one third of the healthy HDF cells. Laser light alone (b) and “bare” gold nanoparticles (c) had little to no effect on either cell. However, although promising results, the entirety of this study was conducted in vitro, and so further testing in vitro would be desirable in order to fully predict how these nanocomposites will react in photothermal therapy when inside the body – for example, in the treatment of mice injected with tumours.9
Thus far, most of the suggested gold nanostructures have been applied in the treatment of tumours via photothermal therapy. The gold/gold sulfide nanoparticles prepared in the method described by Ren and Chow were studied as a method of drug delivery, for the anti-cancer drug cisplatin
Traditionally, drugs would be delivered via chemotherapy, however this method is least convenient to the patient. There is no selectivity as with photothermal therapy, and so healthy cells can also be damaged, although because malignant cells have “abnormal” properties, they are more likely to be affected by the drug.2 Loading the drug onto a carrier presents a level of selectivity, so that the drug will only be released once in the region of the target cells, and thus only the malignant cells are destroyed.
The release of a drug upon heating can be defined as “photodynamic therapy”. In order to determin
