In the study, published in the journal Nanoscale, researchers at St. John’s College in the U.K. created coated microscopic golden nanospheres — 4 million times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — with layers of a common chemotherapy drug called cisplatin and found that when applied to the tumor, the cancer cells stopped reproducing and died, BBC News reports.
 

When they tested the golden nanospheres on brain tumor samples given a dose of radiation similar to what a cancer patient would receive, electrons within the gold particles became “excited,” which triggered the breakdown of genetic material within the cancer cells. That allowed the chemotherapy to attack the weakened tumor.  
 

"This is a double-whammy effect,” said Mark Welland, a professor at St. John’s College. "And by combining this strategy with cancer cell-targeting materials, we should be able to develop therapy for glioblastoma and other challenging cancers in the future."
 

Twenty days after treatment with this novel therapy, there were no viable cancer cells left in the brain tumor samples studied.
 

"We need to be able to hit cancer cells directly with more than one treatment at the same time,” said Colin Watts, M.D., a neurosurgeon involved in the study. "This is important because some cancers are more resistant to one type of treatment than another."
 

Researchers hope the therapy may provide a way to target hard-to-treat cancers and plan to start human trials in 2016.