  The quantitative measurement of structural alterations at the nanoscale level
is important for understanding the physical state of biological samples.
Studies have shown that the progression of cancer is associated with the
rearrangements of building blocks of cells/tissues such as DNA, RNA, lipids,
etc. Partial wave spectroscopy is a recently developed mesoscopic physics-based
spectroscopic imaging technique which can detect such nanoscale changes in
cells/tissues. At present, chemotherapy drug treatment is the only effective
form of treatment; however, the development of drug-resistant cancer cells is a
major challenge for this treatment. Earlier PWS analyses of prostate cancer
cells, a 2D structure, have shown that drug-resistant cancer cells have a
higher degree of structural disorder compared to drug-sensitive cancer cells.
At the same time, structural properties of the metastasize tumor grown to 3D
structure from drug-resistant and drug-sensitive cancer cells within the body
is not well studied. In this paper, the structural properties of tissues from
grown 3D tumors, generated from docetaxel drug-sensitive and drug-resistant
prostate cancer cells xenografted into a mouse model, are studied. The results
show that xenografted tumor tissues from drug-resistant cells have higher
disorder strength than the tumor generated from drug-sensitive prostate cancer
cells. Potential applications of the technique to assess chemotherapy
effectiveness in cancer treatment are discussed.
