posted on 2023-01-04, 09:49authored byWenliang Liu, Yan Wang, Yuqi Wang, Xiaohan Li, Kai Qi, Jiqian Wang, Hai Xu
Cancers are among the leading causes of death currently.
Conventional
radiotherapy and chemotherapy are of limited use in the treatment
of some tumors due to their high toxicity and drug resistance. Plasma
photothermal therapy has attracted extensive attention for the treatment
of tumors due to photothermal properties of plasmonic nanoparticles,
such as gold (Au) nanoparticles, to achieve local hyperthermia with
low toxicity and high efficiency. Herein, we report a kind of special
black noble-metal core–shell nanostructure, with silver (Ag)
nanocubes as the core and amino acid-encoded highly branched Au nanorods
as the shells (l-CAg@Au and d-CAg@Au). The proposed
growth of l-CAg@Au and d-CAg@Au nanocomposites was
an amino acid-encoded Stranski–Krastanov mode. Both l-CAg@Au and d-CAg@Au exhibited outstanding photothermal
conversion compared to the core–shell structure without amino
acids (Ag@Au). d-CAg@Au possessed the best photothermal conversion
efficiency (87.28%) among the composite nanoparticles. The antitumor
therapeutic efficacy of as-prepared samples was evaluated in vitro
and in vivo, and apoptosis analysis was done via flow cytometry. This
work reports novel insights for the preparation of special bimetallic
branched structures and broadens the application of metal nanomaterials
in photothermal tumor therapy.