pH Switchable Nanoplatform for In Vivo Persistent Luminescence Imaging and Precise Photothermal Therapy of Bacterial Infection

The next new disease Emerging infectious diseases are a major threat to health: AIDS, SARS, drug-resistant bacteria and Ebola virus are among the more recent examples. By identifying emerging disease 'hotspots', the thinking goes, it should be possible to spot health risks at an early stage and prepare containment strategies. An analysis of over 300 examples of disease emerging between 1940 and 2004 suggests that these hotspots can be accurately mapped based on socio-economic, environmental and ecological factors. The data show that the surveillance effort, and much current research spending, is concentrated in developed economies, yet the risk maps point to developing countries as the more likely source of new diseases. Supplementary information The online version of this article (doi:10.1038/nature06536) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Show more

Over the last decade, organic photothermal therapy (PTT) agents have attracted increasing attention as a potential complement for, or alternative to, classical drugs and sensitizers involving inorganic nanomaterials. In this tutorial review, we provide a structured description of the main classes of organic photothermal agents and their characteristics. Representative agents that have been studied in the context of photothermal therapy since 2000 are summarized and recent advances in using PTT agents to address various cancers indications are highlighted. Show more

Conventionally, ceramics-based materials, fabricated by high-temperature solid-phase reaction and sintering, are preferred as bone scaffolds in hard-tissue engineering because of their tunable biocompatibility and mechanical properties. However, their possible biomedical applications have rarely been considered, especially the cancer phototherapeutic applications in both the first and second near-infrared light (NIR-I and NIR-II) biowindows. In this work, we explore, for the first time as far as we know, a novel kind of 2D niobium carbide (Nb2C), MXene, with highly efficient in vivo photothermal ablation of mouse tumor xenografts in both NIR-I and NIR-II windows. The 2D Nb2C nanosheets (NSs) were fabricated by a facile and scalable two-step liquid exfoliation method combining stepwise delamination and intercalation procedures. The ultrathin, lateral-nanosized Nb2C NSs exhibited extraordinarily high photothermal conversion efficiency (36.4% at NIR-I and 45.65% at NIR-II), as well as high photothermal stability. The Nb2C NSs intrinsically feature unique enzyme-responsive biodegradability to human myeloperoxidase, low phototoxicity, and high biocompatibility. Especially, these surface-engineered Nb2C NSs present highly efficient in vivo photothermal ablation and eradication of tumor in both NIR-I and NIR-II biowindows. This work significantly broadens the application prospects of 2D MXenes by rationally designing their compositions and exploring related physiochemical properties, especially on phototherapy of cancer. Show more