Black Phosphorus-Based Drug Nanocarrier For Photothermal/Targeted Leukemia Therapy

Recently,nanomaterials have attracted much attention in biomedical fields with the rapid development of biomedicine and nanotechnology.Traditional cancer treatments remain far from optimal therapies due to their low curative effect and strong systemic side effects.Recently,photothermal therapy(PTT)and targeted therapy based on nanomaterials have been widely studied owing to their high efficiency,minimal invasiveness,controllable drug release and so on.But the poor biodegradability and long-term toxicity of most PTT nanoagents greatly limited their clinical application.The new developed two-dimensional nanomaterial as black phosphorus with excellent optical properties and little cytotoxicity may be a promising alternative.Herein,a compound drug delivery system based on black phosphorus(BP-PEG-Sgc8-DOX)is proposed.First,black phosphorus nanosheets(BPs)were prepared by improved liquid exfoliation technique.Then,polyethylene glycol(PEG)was modified on the surfaces of BPs through electrostatic adsorption,which can effectively protect the interior BPs from water and air to enhance the physiological stability.The obtained PEGylated BPs not only demonstrated an excellent photothermal conversion efficiency and photothermal stability,but also exhibited a good pH and photo dual-responsive drug release ability.In addition,CCK-8 assay result showed that the PEGylated BPs exhibited an excellent biocompatibility and significantly increased cytotoxicity under light irradiation.Furthermore,PEGylated BPs were modified with Sgc8 aptamer through covalent bonding,which achieved an efficient specificity to the targeted cancer cells(CCRF-CEM)and greatly increased the endocytosis of the nanoparticles through a receptor mediated manner.Therefore,the black phosphorus-based drug nanocarrier was demonstrated with an excellent biocompatibility,controllable drug release and targeting specificity,which shows a potential in biomedical applications.