Precisely Tuning Photothermal and Photodynamic Effects of Polymeric Nanoparticles by Controlled Copolymerization

Abstract

Cancer possesses normoxic and hypoxia microenvironments with different levels of oxygen, needing different efficacies of photothermal and photodynamic therapies. It is important to precisely tune the photothermal and photodynamic effects of phototherapy nano‐agents for efficient cancer treatment. Now, a series of copolymeric nanoparticles (PPy‐Te NPs) were synthesized in situ by controlled oxidative copolymerization with different ratios of pyrrole to tellurophene by FeCl3. The photothermal and photodynamic effects of semiconducting nano‐agents under the first near‐infrared (NIR) irradiation were precisely and systematically tuned upon simply varying the molar ratio of the pyrrole to tellurophene. The PPy‐Te NPs were used for cancer treatment in mice, exhibiting excellent biocompatibility and therapeutic effect. This work presents a simple method to tune photothermal and photodynamic therapies effect in semiconducting nano‐agents for cancer treatment.

Polyprodrug Nanomedicines: An Emerging Paradigm for Cancer Therapy

“…Benefiting from the identical structures, batch‐to‐batch variations of drug loading and release profiles can be eliminated in polyprodrug nanomedicines. [ 76–79 ] In addition, when multiple drugs are incorporated into the polymer backbone, the drugs can be delivered at a fixed and optimal ratio to maximize the synergistic effects. [ 77,78 ] For instance, Zhou and coworkers found an optimized ratio of 1:2 of cisplatin and demethylcantharidin (DMC) in combinational tumor chemotherapy.…”

“…Second, a number of biological barriers including limited endothelial permeability and intratumoral diffusion of the therapeutic nanoparticles may result in poor tumor penetration of polyprodrug nanomedicines. [ 16–172 ] Third, the difficulty in tuning the size, shape, surface properties, ...…”

“…Apart from precise drug delivery for tumor chemotherapy, polyprodrug nanomedicines also provide a strategy to deliver well‐controlled phototherapy to the tumor site. [ 76,79 ] Huang and coworkers fabricated copolymeric nanoparticles (PPy‐Te NPs) by polymerization of pyrrole and tellurophene in the presence of FeCl 3 as the catalyst. [ 76 ] The polypyrrole block was employed for photothermal therapy (PTT) while the polytellurophene block was beneficial for photodynamic therapy (PDT).…”

“…[ 76,79 ] Huang and coworkers fabricated copolymeric nanoparticles (PPy‐Te NPs) by polymerization of pyrrole and tellurophene in the presence of FeCl 3 as the catalyst. [ 76 ] The polypyrrole block was employed for photothermal therapy (PTT) while the polytellurophene block was beneficial for photodynamic therapy (PDT). After preparing a series of copolymeric nanoparticles containing different ratios of pyrrole to tellurophene, they found that the photothermal and photodynamic effects of the copolymeric nanomedicine could be precisely controlled by simply tuning the molar ratio of the pyrrole to tellurophene.…”

Mitochondria-Targeted Nanomedicine for Enhanced Efficacy of Cancer Therapy

“…polypeptides (Fang et al, 2020;Kang et al, 2020), proteins, antibodies (Chen et al, 2012;Pan et al, 2021), folic acids (Mitra et al, 2018) and aptamers (Tang et al, 2020;Tian et al, 2021)). On this basis, the unique advantages of nanocarriers have been widely demonstrated including long-term sustained (Xia et al, 2019) and controlled release (Xia et al, 2014) and the integration with more diagnostic or therapeutic modality such as multimodal imaging (Gao et al, 2017;Xia et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2019), photodynamic therapy (PDT) (Lucky et al, 2015;Wen et al, 2020), photothermal therapy (PTT) (Xia et al, 2016;Yang et al, 2017) and immunotherapy (Meraz et al, 2012;Secret et al, 2013). However, the major limitation of nanomedicine lies in the insufficient anticancer therapeutic efficacy, thus there is an urgent demand to further improve their therapy efficacy.…”