Bubbles-enhanced ultrasound mechanotherapy for noninvasive cancer surgery

Ultrasound is a widely used medical imaging and therapeutic modality due to its safety, noninvasiveness, high penetration depth and cost effectiveness. In my talk I will present our recent developments in the field of ultrasound mechanotherapy for applications of noninvasive cancer surgery. Taking microbubbles contrast agents into the nanoscale, holds the promise for noninvasive cancer therapy. Two types of contrast agents, nanobubbles and nanodroplets, will be presented. We show that coupled with low energy insonation at a center frequency below 250 kHz, well below the resonance frequency of these agents, nanoscale bubbles can serve as noninvasive therapeutic warheads that trigger potent mechanical effects in tumors following a systemic injection. As a result, low-energy, bubbles-enhanced ultrasound surgery could be performed, reducing the required energy for standard ultrasound surgery by over an order of magnitude. These capabilities will be demonstrated in tissue mimicking phantoms, in cell cultures and in vivo where bubble-mediated low frequency insonation of breast cancer tumors resulted in effective mechanical tumor ablation and tumor tissue fractionation. The presented approaches provide a unique theranostic platform for safe, noninvasive and low energy tumor mechanotherapy.