Copper-containing nanomaterials have been applied in various fields because of their appealing physical, chemical, and biomedical properties/functions. Herein, for the first time, a facile, room-temperature, and one-pot method of simply mixing copper ions and sulfur-doped carbon dots (CDs) is developed for the synthesis of copper/carbon quantum dot (or CD)-crosslinked nanosheets (CuCD NSs). The thus-obtained CuCD NSs with the size of 20-30 nm had a high photothermal conversion efficiency of 41.3% and good photothermal stability. Especially, after coating with thiol-polyethylene glycol and fluorescent molecules, the resultant CuCD NSs could selectively target tumor tissues and realize multimodal (photoacoustic, photothermal, and fluorescence) imaging-guided cancer therapy. More importantly, our CuCD NSs exhibited laser-triggered cytosolic delivery, lysosomal escape, and nuclear-targeting properties, which greatly enhanced their therapeutic efficacy. The significantly enhanced tumor accumulation of CuCD NSs after in situ tumor-site laser irradiation was also observed in in vivo experiments. These in vitro and in vivo events occurring during the continuous laser irradiation have not been observed. Overall, this work develops a CD-assisted synthetic method of photothermal nanoagents for triple-modal imaging-guided phototherapy and deepens our understanding of the action mechanism of photothermal therapy, which will promote the development of nanomedicine and beyond.
Keywords: carbon dots (CDs); copper-containing photothermal agents; high photothermal conversion efficiency; hyperthemia-induced lysosomal escape; photothermal therapy.