“…For this reason, a variety of nanoparticle systems are currently being explored for cancer therapeutics (Haley and Frenkel 2008), which include dendrimers (Zhao et al 2014), liposome (Allison 2007;Bovis et al 2012), micelles (Lee et al 2003), carbon nanotubes (Huang et al 2010), and polymeric nanoparticles (Kumari et al 2010;Li and Liu 2014). Several nanoparticles based on organic and inorganic chromophores, which show strong absorption in the near-infrared (NIR) tissuetransparency window, such as gold and carbon nanomaterials, have displayed encouraging photothermal therapeutic efficacy in preclinical animal experiments (Yuan et al 2012;Chu et al 2013). However, the major issue with these types of nanomaterials is their low biocompatibility, particularly their long-term toxicity, which limits their clinical application (Balasubramanian et al 2010;Zhang et al 2011).…”