Abstract
Photothermal therapy, in which light is converted into heat and triggers local hyperthermia to ablate tumors, presents an inherently specific and noninvasive treatment for tumor tissues. In this area, the development of efficient photothermal agents (PTAs) has always been a central topic. Although many efforts have been made on the investigation of novel molecular architectures and photothermal materials over the past decades, PTAs can cause severe damage to normal tissues because of the poor tumor aggregate ability and high irradiation density. Recently, dual-targeted photothermal agents (DTPTAs) provide an attractive strategy to overcome these problems and enhance cancer therapy. DTPTAs are functionalized with two classes of targeting units, including tumor environment targeting sites, tumor targeting sites and organelle targeting sites. In this perspective, typical targeted ligands and representative examples of photothermal therapeutic agents with dual-targeted properties are systematically summarized and recent advances using DTPTAs in tumor therapy are highlighted.
Highlights
According to the mechanism of photothermal therapy (PTT) for cancer therapy, it achieves the goal of killing cancer cells via converting light energy to heat in order to trigger local hyperthermia in tumor, so PTT does not suffer from the limitations in hypoxic environments compared to photodynamic therapy (PDT)
Great efforts have been made to develop efficient dual-targeted photothermal agents (DTPTAs), there are still some challenging problems to be resolved in the future. (a) Photosensitizers: the photothermal conversion efficiency (PCE) and potential biological toxicity of photosensitizers should be carefully considered in advance
Organic photothermal agents (PTAs) have inherent excellent biodegradability, they suffer from the limitations of photostability and thermal stability
Summary
As one of the most intractable diseases, has spoiled millions of lives due to its high morbidity and mortality.[1,2] Over the past decades, great efforts have been focused on the development of efficient therapeutics for cancer treatment, such as surgery,[3] radiotherapy,[4,5] chemotherapy,[6,7] photodynamic therapy (PDT),[8,9,10] photothermal therapy (PTT)[11,12,13] and immunotherapy.[14,15,16] In particular, PTT has attracted extensive attention due to its inherent advantages of minimal invasion and external light control. DTPTAs can trigger cell necrosis at low temperature and cause negligible damage to surrounding tissues when one of the targeted ligands tends to aggregate in the organelle, where heat-sensitive proteins and DNA are enriched. Magnetic targeting is a method for arti cially controlling tumor aggregation based on an external magnetic eld Magnetic materials, such as iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs)[38] have been widely used for anti-cancer treatment due to their properties, such as non-toxicity, small size, and easy functionalization. Hyaluronic acid (HA), as an endogenous polysaccharide, binds well to CD44 and is mediated to internalize into cells For these reasons, HA modi ed therapeutic agents[59,60] have been widely developed and applied in tumortargeted therapy and are considered to be an effective method to inhibit tumor metastasis. Sulfamides[69] and pardaxin (FAL) peptides[70] have been widely used as good ligands for ER-targeted therapy
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