¹⁷⁷ Lu Radiolabelled AIE Dots for Multimodal Imaging Guided Photothermal/Radiopharmaceutical Tumor Therapy

Aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIEgens) in the second near-infrared region (NIR-II,1000-1700 nm) have shown tremendous potential as theragnostic probe for tumor multimodal diagnostic imaging and combined treatment owing to their programmable optical, structural and functional properties. Herein, we presented a radionuclide ¹⁷⁷ Lu-labeled AIEgen, ¹⁷⁷ Lu-2TT-oC6B dots, for NIR-II fluorescence and SPECT/CT imaging-guided tumor photothermal and radiopharmaceutical therapy. Intriguingly, ¹⁷⁷ Lu-2TT-oC6B self-assembled into 10 nm dots, exhibited high NIR-II fluorescence quantum yield (QY, 1.34 %) and unprecedented photothermal conversion efficiency (PCE, 70.3 %) in vitro, furtherly performed extremely long blood circulation (T_1/2 =52.4 h), persistent tumor accumulation and retention in tumor (NIR-II SNR=5.56; SPECT SNR=36.59) via intravenous administration in vivo. Furthermore, upon NIR light activation and ¹⁷⁷ Lu irradiation, ¹⁷⁷ Lu-2TT-oC6B demonstrated great application potential in synergistic photothermal/radiopharmaceutical tumor therapy.