Yes, you have to use plotmath annotations. So the text has to be parsed as an expression, and you can use functions such as italics() and bold(). But beware, you can't have spaces, spaces have to be represented with ~ or *.
ggplot(mtcars) +
geom_point(aes(x=cyl, y=mpg)) +
xlab(parse(text="bold('My axis title')~' ('*italic('unit')*')'"))