Fabrication of BiCuOS nanoflowers acting as nanoarrays on photonic nanoparticles for chemo-photothermal therapy

Abstract

In recent years, 3D flower shaped nanostructures with an ability to improve internal photo reflections and absorptions is gaining popularity for the development of photo-thermal heat generating materials for cancer therapy. The use of bimetallic oxysulfide materials as photo-thermal agent is especially interesting as it is not only resulting in heat generation by absorbing laser light in the biological window but also participates in reactive oxygen species generation in tumor environment. In this work, we have reported a novel flower shaped BiCuOS nanostructures made of CuS base structures with vertical nanoarrays of bismuth oxide nanoplates for synergistic chemo-photothermal cancer therapy. Notably, 2D nanoplates (∼150 ± 50 nm in length and thickness of about ∼25 nm) could be seen grown in the form of nanoflowers (NFs) of 800 ± 100 nm in size on CuS base structures. The electronic structure, density of states, bond angle, bond length and thermal stability of formed NFs were investigated by density functional theory and molecular dynamic studies. The photo-thermal conversion efficiency was increased as a function of NF concentration. The percentage of doxorubicin released was estimated to be only ∼4% even after one day of incubation at pH 7.4 which increased to 38 and 45% at pH 5.5 without and with near infra-red light exposure, respectively. The cell viability experiments with fibroblast cells and red blood cells exhibited excellent biocompatibility of BiCuOS NFs. The synthesized BiCuOS NFs showed excellent anticancer activity against Hep-2 cells. Hence, the BiCuOS NFs reported here have huge potential for use as novel dual performing chemo-and-photothermal agent for advanced cancer therapy.