Salt-induced aggregation of gold nanoparticles for photoacoustic imaging and photothermal therapy of cancer

Mengmeng Sun; Fei Liu; Yukun Zhu; Wansheng Wang; Jin Hu; Jing Liu; Zhifei Dai; Kun Wang; Yen Wei; Jing Bai; Weiping Gao

doi:10.1039/C6NR00056H

Salt-induced aggregation of gold nanoparticles for photoacoustic imaging and photothermal therapy of cancer†

Mengmeng Sun,^a Fei Liu,^a Yukun Zhu,^b Wansheng Wang,^a Jin Hu,^a Jing Liu,^a Zhifei Dai,^c Kun Wang,^b Yen Wei,^d Jing Bai^a and Weiping Gao*^a

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* Corresponding authors

^a Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
E-mail: gaoweiping@tsinghua.edu.cn

^b Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, the State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

^c College of Engineering and Peking University Third Hospital, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

^d Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Abstract

The challenge in photothermal therapy (PTT) is to develop biocompatible photothermal transducers that can absorb and convert near-infrared (NIR) light into heat with high efficiency. Herein, we report salt-induced aggregation of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) in biological media to form highly efficient and biocompatible NIR photothermal transducers for PTT and photothermal/photoacoustic (PT/PA) imaging of cancer. The GNP depots in situ formed by salt-induced aggregation of GNPs show strong NIR absorption induced by plasmonic coupling between adjacent GNPs and very high photothermal conversion efficiency (52%), enabling photothermal destruction of tumor cells. More interestingly, GNPs in situ aggregate in tumors to form GNP depots, enabling simultaneous PT/PA imaging and PTT of the tumors. These findings may provide a simple and effective way to develop a new class of intelligent and biocompatible NIR photothermal transducers with high efficiency for PT/PA imaging and PTT.

Nanoscale

Salt-induced aggregation of gold nanoparticles for photoacoustic imaging and photothermal therapy of cancer†

Abstract

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Salt-induced aggregation of gold nanoparticles for photoacoustic imaging and photothermal therapy of cancer

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