Lipid-coated iron oxide nanoparticles for dual-modal imaging of hepatocellular carcinoma

The development of noninvasive imaging techniques for the accurate diagnosis of progressive hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is of great clinical significance and has always been desired. Herein, a hepatocellular carcinoma cell-targeting fluorescent magnetic nanoparticle (NP) was obtained by conjugating near-infrared fluorescence to the surface of Fe₃O₄ (NIRF-Fe₃O₄) NPs, followed by coating the lipids consisting of tumoral hepatocytes-targeting polymer (Gal-P₁₂₃). This magnetic NP (GPC@NIRF-Fe₃O₄) with superparamagnetic behavior showed high stability and safety in physiological conditions. In addition, GPC@NIRF-Fe₃O₄ achieved more specific uptake of human liver cancer cells than free Fe₃O₄ NPs. Importantly, with superpara-magnetic iron oxide and strong NIR absorbance, GPC@NIRF-Fe₃O₄ NPs demonstrate prominent tumor-contrasted imaging performance both on fluorescent and T₂-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) imaging modalities in a living body. The relative MR signal enhancement of GPC@NIRF-Fe₃O₄ NPs achieved 5.4-fold improvement compared with NIR-Fe₃O₄ NPs. Therefore, GPC@ NIRF-Fe₃O₄ NPs may be potentially used as a candidate for dual-modal imaging of tumors with information covalidated and directly compared by combining fluorescence and MR imaging.