Novel rod-like carbon nanomaterials as near infrared-responsive drug delivery system for potential anticancer applications

The combination of chemotherapy and photothermal therapy shows great potential in cancer treatment, and the carbon nanomaterials have been attracted great attention in biomedical technology. However, it is still a great challenge to design stimuli-responsive nano-carbon-based drug release systems with integrated functions. In this paper, rod-like carbon nanomaterials (RCNs) were prepared by the soft template hydrothermal method with glucose as raw materials, which were proved to have high photothermal efficiency (similar to 23.7%), as well as good biocompatibility and excellent drug-loading capacity. After that, RCNs were used to load doxorubicin (DOX) as DOX@RCNs for integrated photothermal/chemotherapy towards cancer, which demonstrated 52.2% higher cancer cell killing efficiency than that of RCNs under near infrared (NIR) irradiation in vitro. The authors' approach provided a novel NIR-responsive nano platform for combined photothermal/chemotherapy towards cancer, which was considered to be of great potential in anticancer applications. Novel rod-like carbon nanomaterials were prepared as near infrared-responsive drug delivery system for potential anticancer applications.image