Construction of core-in-shell Au@N-HCNs nanozymes for tumor therapy

Noble metals act as nanozymes that can generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) by catalysis to induce apoptosis of tumor cells for cancer therapy. But they are easy to aggregate, which will affect their further application. Carbon materials are often used as the carrier of noble metals to improve their catalytic performance. However, designing a composite structure to build an efficient carbon/noble metal hybrid nanozyme with high catalytic performance for tumor therapy is still a significant challenge. In this work, a core-in-shell structure nanozyme composed of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) embedded in nitrogen-doped hollow carbon nanoshells (AuNPs@N-HCNs) were fabricated, which exhibited peroxidase-like (POD-like) and oxidase-like (OXD-like) activity. Compared with core-out-of-shell structure composite, the AuNPs@N-HCNs showed a better ability to generate ROS to kill tumor cells. Furthermore, AuNPs@N-HCNs also exhibited satisfactory photothermal conversion properties, which helped build a platform for photothermal therapy. Meanwhile, the enzyme activity produced by AuNPs@N-HCNs increased significantly under light irradiation. Comparing the size of AuNPs in carbon shell, 15 nm AuNPs were better than 2 nm in both enzyme-like activities and in vivo therapeutic effect. In vitro and in vivo studies demonstrated that under the synergistic effect of light-enhancing nanozyme catalysis and photothermal therapy, AuNPs@N-HCNs could induce cancer cell apoptosis and destroy tumors effectively, which provided evidence for the feasibility of tumor catalytic-photothermal treatment.