Lanthanide-Doped Upconversion Nanocarriers for Drug and Gene Delivery.

Gibok Lee,Yong Park

doi:10.3390/nano8070511

Abstract

Compared to traditional cancer treatments, drug/gene delivery is an advanced, safe, and efficient method. Nanoparticles are widely used as nanocarriers in a drug/gene delivery system due to their long circulation time and low multi-drug resistance. In particular, lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) that can emit UV and visible light by near-infrared (NIR) upconversion demonstrated more efficient and safer drug/gene delivery. Because of the low penetration depth of UV and visible light, a photoinduced reaction such as photocleavage or photoisomerization has proven restrictive. However, NIR light has high tissue penetration depth and stimulates the photoinduced reaction through UV and visible emissions from lanthanide-doped UCNPs. This review discusses the optical properties of UCNPs that are useful in bioapplications and drug/gene delivery systems using the UCNPs as a photoreaction inducer.

Highlights

Cancer is one of the major diseases that threatens human health worldwide
Chemotherapy works on the whole body in addition to the cancerous tissues and results in low tumor-specific targeting, severe side effects, drug dependence, and multi-drug resistance (MDR) [1,2,3,4]
Nanoparticles tend to accumulate in tumor lesions through the relatively leaky tumor vasculature, and this accumulation is associated with the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect [8,9,10,11]

Summary

Introduction

Cancer is one of the major diseases that threatens human health worldwide. Many researchers have developed various cancer treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. The large specific surface area of nanoparticles and mesoporous/hollow nanostructures increases the amount of drug/gene loading To exploit these advantages, many researchers have designed nanocarriers such as liposomes [12,13,14,15], polymeric micelles [16,17,18], polymeric nanoparticles [19,20,21], carbon nanotubes [22,23], reduced graphene oxides [24,25,26], gold nanoparticles [27,28,29], magnetic nanoparticles [30,31,32], and lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) [33,34,35,36,37,38]. Photoinduced delivery systems enhance the efficacy of spatial and temporal control of drug/gene release and minimize normal cell death, side effects, and the tissue damage

Lanthanide-Doped UCNPs

Destruction of the Carrier

Findings

Conclusions and Future Prospects