Preparation Of Gold-Based Functional Nanomaterials And Application In Cancer Theranostics

Cancer has been one of the major threats to the lives of human beings for centuries.Current cancer therapies mainly include surgery,chemotherapies,and radiotherapies.While surgery in many occasions is not able to completely remove all cancer cells.Chemotherapy and radiotherapy all suffer from their severe toxic side effects to normal tissues.PTT employs photoabsorbing nanoagents to generate heat from light,leading to thermal ablation of cancer cells and the subsequent cell death.Photothermal therapy is able to selectively kill cancer cells under light irradiation,without causing much damage to normal tissues.With the development of nanomaterials research,some multifunctional nanomaterials with near infrared absorption?NIR?have been reported as photothermal agents.In the reported photothermal materials,gold nanomaterials have high efficiency of photothermal conversion,and can be used for photothermal treatment.It also has the properties of X-ray computed tomography?CT?/photoacoustic?PA?imaging,which can be used for diagnose cancer.Although gold based nanomaterials have made great achievements,there are still some problems need to be solved,such as large size,poor biocompatibility and low drug loading capability.We designed two kinds of gold-based multifunctional nanomaterials based on gold nanomaterials,which have great application prospects in biomedical applications.In this paper,a simple synthesis strategy was used to prepare the multifunctional Au nanorod@polyacrylic acid/calcium phosphate?AuNR@PAA/CaP?yolk-shell nanoparticles?NPs?.The NPs can load drug and have pH/NIR response ability.The gold nanorods can be applied in PTT and CT/PA imaging.The calcium phosphate?CaP?has pH responsiveness and can be successfully used for drug delivery.It is noted that the shell CaP is a biocompatible,non-toxic inorganic nanomaterial,and it is contained in the human teeth and bones.The yolk-shell NPs can be applied for dual-modal PA/CT imaging and chemo-photothermal therapy.For the further work,the multifunctional branched PEG-Au-Fe₃O₄ Janus NPs have the NIR absorption peak and can be used for PTT and PAI.The Fe₃O₄ component can be used for magnetic resonance?MR?imaging.The Janus NPs were applied for triple-modal PA/CT/MR imaging in vitro.The branched PEG-Au-Fe₃O₄ Janus NPs are very potential diagnostic reagents for biomedical applications.