Near-Infrared-Absorbing Diketopyrrolopyrrole-Based Semiconducting Polymer Nanoparticles for Photothermal Therapy

Photothermal therapy, an excellent therapeutic approach, has received much attention in recent years. Herein, a novel diketopyrrolopyrrole polymer (DPP-BDP) is prepared, which shows intense near-infrared (NIR) optical absorption and admirable photothermal conversion efficacy. Impressively, after assembly into nanoparticles (DB-FA), the as-prepared conjugated polymer demonstrates a uniformly distributed size around 200 nm with remarkable NIR absorption at 808 nm. Additionally, it displays high biocompatibility and photostability. More interestingly, the obtained DB-FA NPs are uptaken by cancer cells and present excellent anticancer in vitro and in vivo under 0.8 W cm(-2) or 1 W cm(-2) NIR laser irradiation, respectively. Hence, this work is expected to pave the way for using conjugated-polymer nanoparticles as a powerful photothermal agents for anticancer applications.