Rapid Degradation and High Renal Clearance of Cu3BiS3 Nanodots for Efficient Cancer Diagnosis and Photothermal Therapy in vivo

A key challenge for the use of inorganic nanomedicines in clinical applications is their long-term accumulation in internal organs, which raises the common concern on the risk of adverse effects and inflammatory responses.

It is thus necessary to rationally design inorganic nanomaterials with proper accumulation and clearance mechanism in vivo. Herein, we prepared ultra-small Cu3BiS3 nanodots (NDs) as a single-phased ternary bimetal sulfide for photothermal cancer therapy guided by multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) and X-ray computed tomography (CT) due to excellent X-ray attenuation coefficient of Bi element. We then monitored and investigated their absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion as well. We also used CT imaging to demonstrate that Cu3BiS3 NDs can be quickly removed through renal clearance, which may be related to their small size, rapid chemical transformation and degradation in acidic lysosomal environment as characterized by synchrotron radiation-based X-ray absorption near edge structure (SR-XANES) spectroscopy. These results reveal that Cu3BiS3 NDs act as a simple but powerful "theranostic" nanoplatform for MSOT/CT imaging-guided tumor ablation with excellent metabolism and rapid clearance that will improve safety for clinical applications in the future.

ACS nano. 2016 Mar 25 [Epub ahead of print]

Jing Liu, Pengyang Wang, Xiao Zhang, Liming Wang, Dongliang Wang, Zhanjun Gu, Jinglong Tang, Mengyu Guo, Mingjing Cao, Huige Zhou, Ying Liu, Chunying Chen