A Chinese-American joint research team developed a type of biconcave carbon nanodisk with higher tumor accumulation to enhance the anticancer drug function.

The ability of a single nano-object to perform multiple functions has gained much attention in biomedicine areas because practical applications often require synchronously disease detection, bioimaging, drug delivery and cancer therapy.

Despite the development of nanocarriers has achieved much progress, the therapeutic efficacy for cancer therapy is still limited by their low tumor accumulation.

Previous studies have shown that the shapes of nanocarriers could not only influence their cellular internalization but also their biodistribution and blood circulation time, and may enhance tumor accumulation.

In this study, biconcave carbon nanodisk has been synthesized to address the tumor accumulation of nanocarrier.

The team at first synthesized Fe3O4/carbon core/shell template nanoparticles. And then they removed magnetic core by dissolving template nanoparticles in the acid solution at 200 C.

Compared with carbon nanospheres, carbon nanodisk developed by the team exhibited higher uptake rate by tumor cells and greater accumulation in tumors. The nanodisk demonstrated fluorescent imaging capability, an exceedingly high loading capacity (94.78 wt%) for doxorubicin (DOX), and pH-responsive drug release.

The nanodisk also absorbed and transformed near-infrared (NIR) light to heat, which enabled simultaneous NIR-responsive drug release for chemotherapy and generation of thermal energy for tumor cell destruction.

This NIR-activated dual therapy demonstrated a near complete suppression of tumor growth in a mouse model of triple-negative breast cancer when DOX-loaded nanodisks were administered systemically.

The joint research team was led by Prof. ZHANG Miqin from University of Washington and Prof. WANG Hui from High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The work was supported by National Institutes of Health and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Synthesis and structure of biconcave carbon nanodisks. (Image by WANG Hui)