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Traditional targeting nanoprobes suffer from the risks of partial loss of targeting activity and nanoparticle aggregation induced by post-synthetic modifications, ambiguous toxicity, tedious synthesis procedures and environmentally hazardous processes. Herein, we report a green and facile strategy to fabricate transferrin-indocyanine green nanoparticles as a smart theranostic agent with intrinsic biosafety and active targeting abilities for near-infrared fluorescent imaging and photothermal therapy of tumors. Simple mixing of transferrin and indocyanine green enables their self-assembly in aqueous solution to form nanoparticles with excellent water solubility, colloidal stability, favorable biocompatibility and impressive active targeting theranostic effects in vitro and in vivo. The transferrin-indocyanine green nanoparticles show great potential in theranostic applications of tumors in clinical therapy.

The versatile application of nanoparticles in integrating imaging and therapy has aroused extensive research interest in precision medicine. Of the various nanoparticles that have been studied, CuS has shown great potential in the construction of multifunctional agents, owing to its excellent photothermal heating properties. Herein, we report a facile one-pot biomineralization approach for the preparation of versatile bovine-serum-albumin-conjugated CuS/Gd2 O3 hybrid nanoparticles (BSA-CuS/Gd2 O3 HNPs), which simultaneously possessed strong longitudinal relaxivity, an outstanding photothermal effect, high drug-loading capacity, and pH/temperature-responsive drug release. The versatile nanoparticles were used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and antitumor photothermal chemotherapy, both in vitro and in vivo. In vivo MRI showed that the BSA-CuS/Gd2 O3 HNPs had a long circulation time and effective passive tumor-uptake ability. More importantly, combined in vitro and in vivo therapy demonstrated that drug-loaded BSA-CuS/Gd2 O3 HNPs offered outstanding synergistic therapeutic efficacy for tumor inhibition., (© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)

High-performance and biocompatible contrast agents are the key to accurate diagnosis of various diseases in vivo via CT imaging. Fabrication of pure Bi nanoparticles is the best way to maximize X-ray absorption efficiency due to the ultrahigh X-ray attenuation ability of Bi and 100% content of Bi element. However, high-quality Bi nanoparticles prepared through a facile strategy are still lacking. Herein, we report a simple noninjection method to fabricate uniformly sized pure Bi nanoparticles using only two commercial reagents by simply heating the mixture of raw materials in a short time. The obtained Bi nanoparticles owned highly uniform size, excellent monodispersity, and impressive antioxidant capacity. After being modified with oligosaccharide, the "sweet" Bi nanoprobe with comfortable patient experience and favorable biocompatibility was successfully used in CT visualization of gastrointestinal tract in detail.

Photothermal therapy as a physical therapeutic approach has greatly attracted research interest due to its negligible systemic effects. Among the various photothermal agents, CuS nanoparticles have been widely used due to their easy preparation, low cost, high stability and strong absorption in the NIR region. However, the ambiguous biotoxicity of CuS nanoparticles limited their bio-application. So it is highly desirable to develop biocompatible CuS photothermal agents with the potential of clinical translation. Herein, we report a novel method to synthesize biocompatible CuS nanoparticles for photothermal therapy using bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a template via mimicking biomaterialization processes. Owing to the inherent biocompatibility of BSA, the toxicity assays in vitro and in vivo showed that BSA-CuS nanoparticles possessed good biocompatibility. In vitro and in vivo photothermal therapies were performed and good results were obtained. The bulk of the HeLa cells treated with BSA-CuS nanoparticles under laser irradiation (808 nm) were killed, and the tumor tissues of mice were also successfully eliminated without causing any obvious systemic damage. In summary, a novel strategy for the synthesis of CuS nanoparticles was developed using BSA as the template, and the excellent biocompatibility and efficient photothermal therapy effects of BSA-CuS nanoparticles show great potential as an ideal photothermal agent for cancer treatment.

The versatile application of nanoparticles in integrating imaging and therapy has aroused extensive research interest in precision medicine. Of the various nanoparticles that have been studied, CuS has shown great potential in the construction of multifunctional agents, owing to its excellent photothermal heating properties. Herein, we report a facile one-pot biomineralization approach for the preparation of versatile bovine-serum-albumin-conjugated CuS/Gd2O3 hybrid nanoparticles (BSA−CuS/Gd2O3 HNPs), which simultaneously possessed strong longitudinal relaxivity, an outstanding photothermal effect, high drug-loading capacity, and pH/temperature-responsive drug release. The versatile nanoparticles were used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and antitumor photothermal chemotherapy, both in vitro and in vivo. In vivo MRI showed that the BSA−CuS/Gd2O3 HNPs had a long circulation time and effective passive tumor-uptake ability. More importantly, combined in vitro and in vivo therapy demonstrated that drug-loaded BSA−CuS/Gd2O3 HNPs offered outstanding synergistic therapeutic efficacy for tumor inhibition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clinical diagnosis of malignant tumors using nanoprobes needs severe improvements in the aspects of sensitivity and biocompatibility. Integrating a dual-targeting strategy with the selection of human-inherent elements and molecules as raw materials shows great potential in the development of a biosafe and sensitive nanoplatform. To carry out the proposed design, we constructed a biocompatible, dual-targeting MR imaging nanoprobe, based on Fe3O4 nanoparticles (NPs) co-modified with inherently innoxious hyaluronic acid (HA) and transferrin (Tf). HA was used as both a template and a targeting molecule to form Fe3O4@HA NPs through a one-step co-precipitation method, which were then further modified with Tf to obtain the dual-targeting Fe3O4@HA@Tf NPs at room temperature. The excellent biocompatibility of the nanoprobe was demonstrated via toxicity assays in vitro and in vivo. The desirable dual-targeting ability towards tumor cells was confirmed by a cellular uptake test (Hela cells, overexpressing both CD44 and transferrin receptors), and the developed nanoprobe was successfully applied in tumor-targeted MR imaging in vivo. In summation, we developed a dual-targeting Fe3O4 nanoprobe, following a facile procedure at room temperature. The nanoprobe showed a high targeting ability towards tumor cells and excellent biocompatibility, which showed its great potential to be applied in the clinical diagnosis of tumors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]