Exfoliation and in situ functionalization of MoS2 nanosheets for MRI-guided combined low-temperature photothermal therapy and chemotherapy

Abstract

Traditional photothermal therapy (PTT) usually requires hyperthermia (greater than50 °C) to mediate effective tumor ablation, which could inevitably induce heating damage to the adjacent normal tissues. Therefore, to achieve effective tumor killing at relatively low temperature is crucial to improve the application of PTT. MoS2, as an attractive photothermal agents, have attracted much attention in biomedical applications. But the separation of exfoliation and functionalization of MoS2 nanosheets (NSs) partly complicates the preparation process of MoS2 NSs-based theranostic nanomaterials. Herein, we formulated a facile one-pot approach for the exfoliation and in situ functionalization of single-layer MoS2 nanosheets by using bovine serum albumin template gadolinium oxide (BSA-Gd2O3) nanoparticles as the exfoliating agent and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) T1 contrast agent. On this basis, hyaluronic acid (HA) was further conjugated to target cancer cells with overexpression of CD44, and then gambogic acid (GA), a natural heat shock protein 90 inhibitor and antitumor drug was loaded, which could reduce the thermo-resistance of tumor cells and achieve effective PTT at a mild temperature (43–45 °C). In this research, both in vitro and in vivo experiments have confirmed that the GA/MoS2/BSA-Gd2O3-HA nanocomposite possesses good biocompatibility and is promising for the application in MRI-guided combined low-temperature PTT and chemotherapy.