Dual-Modality Positron Emission Tomography/Optical Image-Guided Photodynamic Cancer Therapy with Chlorin...

Multifunctional nanoparticles with combined diagnostic and therapeutic functions show great promise in nanomedicine. Herein, we develop an organic photodynamic therapy (PDT) system based on polyethylene glycol (PEG)-coated nanomicelles conjugated with ∼20% chlorin e6 (PEG-Ce 6 nanomicelles), which functions as an optical imaging agent, as well as a PDT agent. The formed PEG-Ce 6 nanomicelles with the size of ∼20 nm were highly stable in various physiological solutions for a long time. Moreover, Ce 6 can also be a (64)Cu chelating agent for in vivo positron emission tomography (PET). By simply mixing, more than 90% of (64)Cu was chelator-free labeled on PEG-Ce 6 nanomicelles, and they also showed high stability in serum conditions. Both fluorescence imaging and PET imaging revealed that PEG-Ce 6 nanomicelles displayed high tumor uptake (13.7 ± 2.2%ID/g) after intravenous injection into tumor-bearing mice at the 48 h time point. In addition, PEG-Ce 6 nanomicelles exhibited excellent PDT properties upon laser irradiation, confirming the theranostic properties of PEG-Ce 6 nanomicelles for imaging and treatment of cancer. In addition, PDT was not shown to render any appreciable toxicity. This work presents a theranostic platform based on polymer nanomicelles with great potential in multimodality imaging-guided photodynamic cancer therapy.