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Updated: Dec 24, 2025
Photodynamic Therapy with Blended Conducting Polymer/Fullerene Nanoparticle Photosensitizers
Published on: October 28, 2015
Multifunctional hyaluronic acid-derived carbon dots for self-targeted imaging-guided photodynamic therapy
Lizhen Zhang1, Zhaoxing Lin, Yun-Xiang Yu
1State Key Laboratory for Chemistry and Molecular Engineering of Medicinal Resources, School of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Science, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, 541004, P. R. China. xcshen@mailbox.gxnu.edu.cn jiangbangping@mailbox.gxnu.edu.cn.
Abstract:
It is of vital importance to engineer the surface structures of carbon dots (CDs) to satisfy their practical biomedical applications, including imaging and treatment. In this work, one type of hyaluronic acid-derived CD (HA-CD) was synthesized via a facile one-step hydrothermal method using cancer cell-targeted HA as a precursor. The as-prepared HA-CDs were targeted actively toward CD44 receptor-overexpressing cancer cells because a partial HA structure remained on the HA-CD surface. Beyond this, HA-CDs can act as a novel photosensitizer, because they can generate O2˙- under 650 nm laser irradiation, and they also exhibit excellent blue photoluminescence emission. The in vitro results revealed that HA-CDs imaged selectively CD44-overexpressing cancer cells and inhibited their growth under 650 nm laser irradiation. Thus, HA-CDs can serve as a promising self-targeted imaging-guided photodynamic therapy (PDT) agent for cancer. The present research provides a promising new method to simply construct multifunctional CD-based targeted phototheranostic systems.
