Endogenously-activated ultrasmall-in-nano therapeutics: Assessment on 3d head and neck squamous cell carcinomas

Negative or positive HPV-associated Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinomas (HNSCCs) are high recurrence neoplasms usually resulting in a poor prognosis, mainly due to metastasis formation. Despite the low overall patient survival rate and the severe side effects, the treatment of choice is still cisplatin-based chemotherapy. Here, we report a straightforward protocol for the production of high throughput 3D models of negative or positive HPV-associated HNSCCs, together with their employment in the therapeutic evaluation of gold ultrasmall-in-nano architectures comprising an endogenously-activatable cisplatin prodrug. Beyond enhancing the biosafety of cisplatin, our approach paves the way for the establishment of synergistic co-therapies for HNSCCs based on excretable noble metals. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.