A Bifunctional Scaffold for Tissue Regeneration and Photothermal Therapy

Clinical treatment for cancer comprises surgical removal and chemo/radio-therapy. In general, surgical intervention causes large defects while chemo/radio-therapy brings drug resistance and long-term suffering to patients. Major challenges remain in developing a therapeutic platform for simultaneous cancer treatment and tissue regeneration. In this study, a bifunctional scaffold based on gold nanorods-conjugated bioactive glass (BG@GNR) nanofibers was investigated for this purpose. Owing to gold nanoparticles anchored at the surface of nanofibers, the composite scaffold exhibits excellent photothermal effect. Under 808 nm near-infrared (NIR) irradiation for 5 minutes, the temperature of scaffold reaches ∼42.5 °C which induced more than 89.5% cancer cell death. Meanwhile, the scaffold can effectively promote the proliferation of epithelial cells by 270% after 72 h incubation, confirming its expected bioactivity. The findings suggested that the BG@GNR scaffold holds a promise for localized photothermal therapy and tissue regeneration, which is specifically inspiring in treating tumor-induced defects.