Self-assembling dendrimer nanosystems for specific fluorine magnetic resonance imaging and effective theranostic treatment of tumors

Fluorine magnetic resonance imaging (¹⁹F-MRI) is particularly promising for biomedical applications owing to the absence of fluorine in most biological systems. However, its use has been limited by the lack of safe and water-soluble imaging agents with high fluorine contents and suitable relaxation properties. We report innovative ¹⁹F-MRI agents based on supramolecular dendrimers self-assembled by an amphiphilic dendrimer composed of a hydrophobic alkyl chain and a hydrophilic dendron. Specifically, this amphiphilic dendrimer bears multiple negatively charged terminals with high fluorine content, which effectively prevented intra- and intermolecular aggregation of fluorinated entities via electrostatic repulsion. This permitted high fluorine nuclei mobility alongside good water solubility with favorable relaxation properties for use in ¹⁹F-MRI. Importantly, the self-assembling ¹⁹F-MRI agent was able to encapsulate the near-infrared fluorescence (NIRF) agent DiR and the anticancer drug paclitaxel for multimodal ¹⁹F-MRI and NIRF imaging of and theranostics for pancreatic cancer, a deadly disease for which there remains no adequate early detection method or efficacious treatment. The ¹⁹F-MRI and multimodal ¹⁹F-MRI and NIRF imaging studies on human pancreatic cancer xenografts in mice confirmed the capability of both imaging modalities to specifically image the tumors and demonstrated the efficacy of the theranostic agent in cancer treatment, largely outperforming the clinical anticancer drug paclitaxel. Consequently, these dendrimer nanosystems constitute promising ¹⁹F-MRI agents for effective cancer management. This study offers a broad avenue to the construction of ¹⁹F-MRI agents and theranostics, exploiting self-assembling supramolecular dendrimer chemistry.