Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a common inflammatory bowel disease with a high incidence rate and serious consequences. Attempts in this area are focusing on developing efficient delivery systems for relieving IBD. Herein, we present a kind of near-infrared-II (NIR-II)-activated pollen-derived micromotor (PDMM) as an efficient delivery system for treating IBD. These PDMMs are pollen grains with half of them covered by a gold (Au) layer, which can result in an asymmetric thermal gradient around the PDMMs under NIR-II irradiation, thereby forming a thermophoretic force to drive PDMMs to move spontaneously. Besides, the inherent spiny and hollow architectures of pollen grains endowed the PDMMs with outstanding capacity of adherence and drug delivery, respectively. Based on these features, we have demonstrated that the PDMMs could move actively in vivo with the irradiation of NIR-II light and adhere to the surrounding tissues for drug delivery. Thus, the PDMMs loaded with dexamethasone show desirable curative effects on treating IBD. These results indicated that the proposed PDMM-based delivery system has great potential in clinic gastrointestinal administration.
Keywords: NIR-II; drug delivery; gastrointestinal administration; micromotor; pollen; ulcerative colitis.