Indocyanine Green Loaded Modified Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles as an Effective Photothermal Nanoplatform.

Yiyu Wang,Yujun Dai,Yuwei Li,Sisi Fan,Xiang Li,Jian Shi,Chunqing Niu,Xinyu Wang

doi:10.3390/ijms21134789

Abstract

Photothermal therapy possesses great advantages for the treatment of drug-resistant tumors. Herein, Near Infrared (NIR)-triggered photothermal nanoparticles were developed through loading indocyanine green (ICG), a kind of NIR dye, into amino group-modified silica nanoparticles (SiO2-NH2 NPs). SiO2-NH2 NPs were prepared with immobilization of the amino groups into the framework of silica nanoparticles (SiO2 NPs) by employing (3-aminopropyl)-triethoxysilane (APTES). Before and after the modification of the amino group, the particle sizes of SiO2 NPs showed similar value, around 100 nm. ICG was further adsorbed into SiO2-NH2 NPs by electrostatic attraction to enable SiO2-NH2@ICG NPs as a kind of photothermal agent. The loading rate of ICG to SiO2-NH2 was greatly increased compared to unmodified SiO2, and the stability of ICG was also improved. Moreover, the SiO2-NH2@ICG NPs exhibited efficient photothermal effects due to ICG transforming laser power into local heat through the connected ICG, when NIR laser irradiation turned on for a couple of minutes. Finally, the in vitro antitumor efficacy of SiO2-NH2@ICG NPs was investigated by recording cell proliferation rate and further chronicled the apoptotic morphology evidence by a Calcein-AM/PI fluorescent staining assay, indicating the efficient photothermal targeted therapy for the HepG2 tumor cells.

Highlights

Liver cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world, which is threatening human health and life
In the past few decades, the number of liver cancer patients significantly increased; liver cancer contains hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) [1], and HCC patients are often diagnosed at late stages due to its asymptomatic features
After encapsulation of indocyanine green (ICG), the absorption range of SiO2-NH2@ICG NPs in the Near Infrared (NIR) region became broader, indicating this type of nanoparticle is suitable to be used as NIR-triggered photothermal nanocarriers

Summary

Introduction

Liver cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world, which is threatening human health and life. It is necessary to find new systematic therapeutic modalities for diagnosis and therapy of liver cancer. The common cancer therapeutics, such as transarterial chemoembolization, surgical excision of hepatocellular carcinoma and radiofrequency ablation, increase the survival rate of liver cancer patients [3]. Photothermal therapy (PTT) is a minimally invasive technical method for cancers, which can transform the light energy into thermal energy under light irradiation with the help of photoabsorbers [4,5,6]. NIR light-triggered photothermal nanoagents have attracted much interest for PTT application. Many photothermal nanoagents were developed for generating efficient thermal energy, such as metal nanoparticles, semiconductor nanoparticles (CuS), boron nitride nanosheets (BN)-polydopamine (PDA) immobilized poly (p-phenylene benzobisoxazole) (PBO) fibers, nanohybrid and carbon-based materials (carbon nanotubes or graphenes) [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]

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Results

Conclusion