Synthesis and anisotropic growth of glycerol-based thermoresponsive NIR plasmonic nanogels

Abstract

Polymeric thermoresponsive nanogels (NGs) have shown their potential in the field of nanomedicine. Providing their structure with additional smart modalities to broaden their application scope remains challenging. We hereby describe a novel and convenient strategy for NGs’ construction with anisotropic gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) incorporated. AuNPs act as both, crosslinking points, and light to heat transducers. In our strategy, we incorporate small plasmonic AuNPs that are further anisotropically grown conferring the nanogel with NIR responsive capabilities.