The combination of photothermal therapy and photodynamic therapy has become a powerful cancer treatment technique. However, as most of the experiments using the combination employed multi-component nanocomposites under excitation of separate wavelength, the treatment process became quite complex.
The researchers developed a new theranostic nanoplatform – SiNcOH-DSPE-PEG(NH2) NPs by coating silicon 2,3-naphthalocyanine dihydroxide (SiNcOH) with DSPE-PEG and DSPE-PEG-NH2 for photoacoustic imaging-guided photothermal therapy and photodynamic therapy tumor ablation. The SiNcOH-DSPE-PEG(NH2) NPs has good water solubility and biocompatibility with high photothermal conversion efficiency and singlet oxygen generation capability upon 808 nm NIR laser irradiation. Apart from that, it can be used as a diagnostic nanoagent for photoacoustic imaging due to its high absorption at NIR region.
Both in vivo and in vitro experiments showed that the combination of photothermal therapy and photodynamic therapy under the guidance of photoacoustic imaging excited by single NIR laser can effectively kill cancer cells or tumor tissues. The molecular imaging-guided combination therapy can be realized owing to the SiNcOH-DSPE-PEG(NH2) NPs with easy synthesis and high efficiency in cancer treatment.