Abstract
The photothermal agents have been widely developed due to the minimally invasive treatment for targeted tumor photothermal therapy, which is considered to have great potential for antitumor bioapplications. The development of multifunctional photothermal agents is extremely challenging. This work presents a novel photothermal theragnosis agent, i.e., CuGeO3 nanoparticles (CGO NPs), showing intense absorption in the near-infrared (NIR) window and excellent ability of CT imaging. Due to the strong NIR absorption, CGO NPs exhibit excellent photothermal effect with a photothermal conversion efficiency of 59.4%. Moreover, because of the high X-ray attenuation coefficient of germanium, the CGO NPs have a great potential of CT imaging diagnosis in clinical application. Additionally, the CGO NPs show negligible cytotoxicity in vitro and in vivo, indicating that it can be served as an outstanding contrast and anticancer agent in a biosafe way. Our work opens the way for the development of bimetallic copper-based oxides used in photothermal diagnostic agents for cancer treatment.
Highlights
With the development of medical sciences, the average life expectancy of humans has been significantly improved, but cancer still remains a major threat
CGO nanoparticles were designed and synthesized as biocompatible agents for photothermal therapy by a facile solvothermal method, which showed a favorable application in photothermal therapy (PTT) due to their small size, good dispersion, strong near-infrared (NIR) absorption, and excellent photothermal effect
In order to improve the compatibility of CuGeO3 nanoparticles (CGO NPs), 1 mg of PVP was added to the obtained CGO NP solution with a concentration of 1.25 mg/ml as a mixture solution
Summary
With the development of medical sciences, the average life expectancy of humans has been significantly improved, but cancer still remains a major threat. A series of studies have reported that ternary nanomaterials based on copperbased chalcogenide photosensitizers [for example, CuCo2S4 nanocrystals (Zhang et al, 2019), CuFeS2 nanoplates (Ding et al, 2017), or copper bismuth sulfide (Li et al, 2015)] could show several exciting properties such as strong absorption in the NIR region, excellent photothermal effect, and good photothermal stability. The concentration of the carriers in a semiconductor can be adjusted by doping and crystal defects (Li et al, 2014) These properties make the defect-structured CGO nanoparticles a new type of photothermal diagnostic agent. CGO nanoparticles were designed and synthesized as biocompatible agents for photothermal therapy by a facile solvothermal method, which showed a favorable application in photothermal therapy (PTT) due to their small size, good dispersion, strong near-infrared (NIR) absorption, and excellent photothermal effect. The good biocompatibility performance of Ge and Ge-containing compounds makes it possible to be used as dietary supplements (Gao et al, 2019; Song and Kazarian, 2020)
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