Development of photosensitizer-loaded lipid droplets for photothermal therapy based on thiophene analogs

Photothermal therapy (PTT) was considered as one of the most promising cancer therapies to overcome the severe side effects caused by chemotherapy. Hence, four thiophene analogs were developed to construct novel organic photothermal agents (PTAs) for many biomedical applications in cancer biosensing and photothermal therapies. The efficacy of four compounds was demonstrated by studies of photothermal properties as well as photothermal therapeutic effects. Besides, tumor ablation experiments indicated that HTN2 can effectively suppress tumors in vivo and in vitro as a novel PTA. Hence, PTAs that we designed and synthesized with their advantage of good biocompatibility and facile structural design could be candidates for PTT.