Dual-Functional ¹⁰B-Doped Carbon Dots Enabling Glucose-Based Cancer Cell Recognition and Boron Neutron Capture...

Boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) is a tumor-selective radiotherapy whose efficacy critically depends on efficient and preferential delivery of ¹⁰B to cancer cells. Meanwhile, accurate early cancer diagnosis remains challenging due to subtle intracellular differences between malignant and normal cells. Herein, we report a multifunctional theranostic platform based on boron-doped carbon dots (BCDs) that integrates cancer cell recognition with BNCT. Owing to the presence of boronic functionalities, the BCDs display enzyme-free, selective, and interference-resistant fluorescence enhancement in response to glucose, allowing reliable discrimination of cancer cells with elevated glucose uptake from normal cells. Upon neutron irradiation, BCDs exhibit potent cytotoxicity against B16-F10 melanoma cells in vitro and achieve significant tumor growth suppression in murine melanoma models without systemic toxicity. Furthermore, the intrinsic fluorescence of BCDs enables real-time tracking of ¹⁰B biodistribution through cellular and ex vivo tissue imaging. This work establishes a novel theranostic paradigm by innovatively integrating fluorescence-based cancer recognition into BNCT research, offering new design principles for next-generation multifunctional BNCT agents and advancing integrated cancer diagnostics and therapy.