Theranostic Near-Infrared-Active Conjugated Polymer Nanoparticles
Conjugated polymer nanoparticles (CPNs) based on a common solar cell material (PTB7) have been prepared, and their potential in theranostic applications based on bioimaging and photosensitizing capabilities has been evaluated. The main absorption and emission bands of the prepared CPNs both fell within the NIR-I (650-950 nm) transparency window, allowing facile and efficient implementation of our CPNs as bioimaging agents, as demonstrated in this work for A549 human lung cancer cell cultures. The prepared CPN samples were also shown to produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) upon photoexcitation in the near-infrared or ultraviolet spectral regions, both in aqueous solutions and in HaCaT keratinocyte cell cultures. Importantly, we show that the photosensitizing ability of our CPNs was largely determined by the nature of the stabilizing shell: coating the CPNs with a Pluronic F-127 copolymer led to an improvement of photoinitiated ROS production, while using poly[styrene-co-maleic anhydride] instead completely quenched said process. This work therefore demonstrates that the photosensitizing capability of CPNs can be modulated via an appropriate selection of stabilizing material and highlights the significance of this parameter for the on-demand design of theranostic probes based on CPNs.
Item Type | Article |
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Identification Number | 10.1021/acsnano.1c01257 |
Additional information | © 2021 American Chemical Society. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.1c01257 |
Keywords | conjugated polymer nanoparticles, theranostic probe, nir-i, reactive oxygen species, photodynamic therapy |
Date Deposited | 15 May 2025 14:37 |
Last Modified | 11 Sep 2025 00:18 |
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picture_as_pdf - 2021_05_12_PTB7_CPNs_SI_ACS_Nano_final.pdf
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subject - Submitted Version
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