Biological reduction of nitroimidazole-functionalized gold nanorods for photoacoustic imaging of tumor hypoxia

Yui Umehara; Toki Kageyama; Aoi Son; Yu Kimura; Teruyuki Kondo; Kazuhito Tanabe

doi:10.1039/c9ra00951e

Biological reduction of nitroimidazole-functionalized gold nanorods for photoacoustic imaging of tumor hypoxia

RSC Adv. 2019 May 29;9(29):16863-16868. doi: 10.1039/c9ra00951e. eCollection 2019 May 24.

Authors

Yui Umehara¹, Toki Kageyama¹, Aoi Son¹, Yu Kimura¹, Teruyuki Kondo¹, Kazuhito Tanabe²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Energy and Hydrocarbon Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University Nishikyo-ku Kyoto 615-8510 Japan teruyuki@scl.kyoto-u.ac.jp +81-75-383-2504 +81-75-383-7055.
² Department of Chemistry and Biological Science, College of Science and Engineering, Aoyama Gakuin University 5-10-1 Fuchinobe, Chuo-ku Sagamihara 252-5258 Japan tanabe.kazuhito@chem.aoyama.ac.jp +81-42-759-6493 +81-42-759-6229.

Abstract

Tumor-selective accumulation of gold nanorods (GNR) has been demonstrated for visualization of tumor hypoxia by photoacoustic imaging. We prepared GNRs with hypoxia-targeting nitroimidazole units (G-NI) on their surface. Biological experiments revealed that G-NI produced a strong photoacoustic signal in hypoxic tumor cells and tissues.