Abstract
Cancer theragnosis agents with both cancer diagnosis and therapy abilities would be the next generation of cancer treatment. Recently, nanomaterials with strong absorption in near-infrared (NIR) region have been explored as promising cancer theragnosis agents for bio-imaging and photothermal therapy (PTT). Herein, we reported the synthesis and application of a novel multifunctional theranostic nanoagent based on hyaluronan (HA)-coated FeOOH@polypyrrole (FeOOH@PPy) nanorods (HA-FeOOH@PPy NRs) for photoacoustic imaging (PAI)-guided PTT. The nanoparticles were intentionally designed with rod-like shape and conjugated with tumor-targeting ligands to enhance the accumulation and achieve the entire tumor distribution of nanoparticles. The prepared HA-FeOOH@PPy NRs showed excellent biocompatible and physiological stabilities in different media. Importantly, HA-FeOOH@PPy NRs exhibited strong NIR absorbance, remarkable photothermal conversion capability, and conversion stability. Furthermore, HA-FeOOH@PPy NRs could act as strong contrast agents to enhance PAI, conducting accurate locating of cancerous tissue, as well as precise guidance for PTT. The in vitro and in vivo photothermal anticancer activity results of the designed nanoparticles evidenced their promising potential in cancer treatment. The tumor-bearing mice completely recovered after 17 days of PTT treatment without obvious side effects. Thus, our work highlights the great potential of using HA-FeOOH@PPy NRs as a theranostic nanoplatform for cancer imaging-guided therapy.
Highlights
Photothermal therapeutic agents should have strong absorption of NIR biological transparency window (700– 1870 nm) to set the greater penetration depth into the solid tumor while reducing the scattered and absorbed photons by surrounding healthy tissues to minimize unwanted damages[14,15,16,17]
polypyrrole nanoparticles (PPy NPs) can be synthesized with high yield and low cost[33], which enable the convenience in fabrication process and decrement in treatment cost
The first step was the preparation of monodisperse FeOOH nanorods which were used as rod-like templates for the synthesis of HA-FeOOH@PPy NRs, and the second step was the coating of PPy and HA to FeOOH nanorods
Summary
Photothermal therapeutic agents should have strong absorption of NIR biological transparency window (700– 1870 nm) to set the greater penetration depth into the solid tumor while reducing the scattered and absorbed photons by surrounding healthy tissues to minimize unwanted damages[14,15,16,17]. PPy NPs can be synthesized with high yield and low cost[33], which enable the convenience in fabrication process and decrement in treatment cost. Because of their strong NIR absorbance, PPy NPs were used as PAI contrast agents for cancer diagnosis[34]. We developed novel nanoparticles of hyaluronan-polypyrrole nanorods (HA-FeOOH@ PPy NRs) for PAI-guided PTT to target CD44 positive breast cancer cells. The experimental results showed that the as-prepared multifunctional nanoparticles exhibited precise tumor-targeted imaging for guiding PTT with the positive outcome on the mouse model, holding great promising for future theranostic applications
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