Comparison between gold nanoparticles and conductive polymer nanoparticles used in photothermal therapy

Nanoparticles have been used for over a decade in photothermal therapy for cancer treatment. Cancer has been killing thousands of people around the world for years, therefore researches on different methods of fighting it are done in many fields and nanotechnology is one of them. Photothermal therapy (PTT) is the process of using light-absorbing nanoparticles in the range of near-infrared (NIR), to burn cancer cells by the heat generated from illuminating the nanoparticle. Gold nanoparticles (GNPs) were commonly used due to their great ability to absorb and scatter light. Recently, certain types of conductive polymer nanoparticles (CPNs) have been found to have the great ability to absorb NIR light. The aim of this review paper is to study and compare between the optical and thermal properties of the GNPs, (such as gold nanospheres, gold nanorods and gold nanoshells), and CPNs, such as polyaniline. It was found that, nanoparticles with strong SPR peaks generate more heat, but the optical and thermal properties of GNPs in general, can not be easily tuned to change their surface plasmon resonance (SPR) peaks without changing their dimensions or physical structures, while in the case of PAn only the organic solvent and dopants are changed without the physical structure of the nanoparticle being changed. This result will contribute in finding alternative photothermal therapy cancer treatments that have the ability to raise the temperature of the infected cells to the required heat for burning, by only changing the type of dopant added to the polyaniline and / or the organic solvents.