Biosafety, Nontoxic Nanoparticles for VL-NIR Photothermal Therapy Against Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Jinhuan Chen; Qionghua Li; Fei Wang; Ming Yang; Liang Xie; Xin Zeng

doi:10.1021/acsomega.1c00101

Biosafety, Nontoxic Nanoparticles for VL-NIR Photothermal Therapy Against Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

ACS Omega. 2021 Apr 19;6(17):11240-11247. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.1c00101. eCollection 2021 May 4.

Authors

Jinhuan Chen¹, Qionghua Li¹, Fei Wang¹, Ming Yang², Liang Xie¹, Xin Zeng¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Oral Diseases, National Clinical Research Center for Oral Diseases, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Research Unit of Oral Carcinogenesis and Management, West China Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610041, P. R. China.
² School of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, P. R. China.

Abstract

Semiconductor nanocrystals with extraordinary physicochemical and biosafety properties with unique nanostructures have shown tremendous potential as photothermal therapy (PTT) nanosensitizers. Herein, we successfully synthesized chiral molybdenum (Cys-MoO_3-x ) nanoparticles (NPs) for overcoming the general limitation on electron energy bands and biotoxicity. The obtained Cys-MoO_3-x NPs are selected as an ideal design for the treatment of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) cells through the decoration of cysteine molecules due to excellent initial photothermal spectral analysis of conductivity and light absorbance. Notably, NPs possess the ability to act as visible light (VL) and near-infrared (NIR) double-reactive agents to ablate cancer cells. By combining photoconductive PTT with hypotoxicity biochemotherapy, the treatment validity of OSCC cancer cells can be improved in vitro by up to 89% (808 nm) and get potential PTT effect under VL irradiation, which intuitively proved that the nontoxic NPs were lethally effective for cancer cells under laser irradiation. Hence, this work highlights a powerful and safe NP platform for NIR light-triggered PTT for use in head and neck cancer (HNC) cells, showing promising application prospects in oral tumor treatment.