Biconcave Carbon Nanodisks for Enhanced Drug Accumulation and Chemo-Photothermal Tumor Therapy

Abstract

It is considered a significant challenge to construct nanocarriers that have high drug loading capacity and can overcome physiological barriers to deliver efficacious amounts of drugs to solid tumors. Here, the development of a safe, biconcave carbon nanodisk to address this challenge for treating breast cancer is reported. The nanodisk demonstrates fluorescent imaging capability, an exceedingly high loading capacity (947.8 mg g^-1 , 94.78 wt%) for doxorubicin (DOX), and pH-responsive drug release. It exhibits a higher uptake rate by tumor cells and greater accumulation in tumors in a mouse model than its carbon nanosphere counterpart. In addition, the nanodisk absorbs and transforms near-infrared (NIR) light to heat, which enables simultaneous NIR-responsive drug release for chemotherapy and generation of thermal energy for tumor cell destruction. Notably, this NIR-activated dual therapy demonstrates a near complete suppression of tumor growth in a mouse model of triple-negative breast cancer when DOX-loaded nanodisks are administered systemically.

Keywords: carbon nanodisks; combination therapy; drug carriers; enhanced tumor accumulation; photothermal conversion.