Abstract
Molecular imaging is developing fast towards multi-modality and simultaneous therapy. For molecular imaging, upconversionnanoparticles (UCNPs), especially lanthanide-doped nanocrystals own obvious advantages such as low toxicity,large Stokes shifts, high resistance to photo-bleachingand photochemical degradation. Moreover,near infrared(NIR)excitation contributes to the auto-fluorescenceminimization, a larger penetrating depth, and lessharmfulness to cellscompared with traditional ultraviolet (UV) excitation. On the other hand, the composites of UCNPs withbiological target moleculesexertsuperior performance, broadening theirbiological application scope from multi-modality imaging, to simultaneous drug delivery and targeted therapy. Herein, we review main advances of UCNPs applied to tumor multi-modality imaging and simultaneous therapy over the past few years, explore their application prospects, and discuss the concepts, issues, approaches, and challenges, with the aim of improving the application of UCNPs in biomedical imaging and therapy in near future.
Highlights
Molecular Imaging, as an interdisciplinary, quickdeveloping area, realizes the visualization and qualitative and quantification analysis of the cellular function and gene or protein expression in living organisms
Acting as versatile bioprobes applied in nanomedicine and nanotechnology, upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) should be provided with uniform size and morphology, excellent water-solubility, suitable surface functional groups for bioconjugation with various biomolecules as well as high luminescent efficiency
Our group have adopted the notion of liquid-liquid twophase approach and Ionic liquids (ILs) as fluorine source and create a novel IL-OA dual phase method (Fig. 2), by which hydrophilic and hydrophobic Ln-dopedNaYF4,NaGdF4,NaYbF4,LaF3 could be selectively synthesized in a one-pot step [33,34,35,36,37]
Summary
Molecular Imaging, as an interdisciplinary, quickdeveloping area, realizes the visualization and qualitative and quantification analysis of the cellular function and gene or protein expression in living organisms. Biomarkers interact chemically with their surroundings and in turn alter the image according to molecular changes occurring within the area of interest. This process is markedly different from previous methods of imaging which primarily imaged differences in qualities such as density or water content. This ability to image fine molecular changes opens up an incredible number of exciting possibilities for medical application, including early detection and treatment of early cancer and basic pharmaceutical development. We review main advances of UCNPs applied to tumor multimodality imaging [2] and simultaneous therapy [1] over the past few years, explore their application prospects, and discuss the concepts, issues, approaches and challenges, with the aim of improving the application of UCNPs in biomedical imaging and therapy in near future
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