Advanced Functional Materials
Advanced Functional Materials
5 years ago

A Self-Transformable pH-Driven Membrane-Anchoring Photosensitizer for Effective Photodynamic Therapy to Inhibit Tumor Growth and Metastasis

A Self-Transformable pH-Driven Membrane-Anchoring Photosensitizer for Effective Photodynamic Therapy to Inhibit Tumor Growth and Metastasis
Qian Cheng, Sheng Hong, Wen-Xiu Qiu, Guo-Feng Luo, Xian-Zheng Zhang, Wei-Hai Chen
Poor tumor selectivity and short life span of reactive oxygen species (ROS) are two major challenges in photodynamic therapy (PDT). In this study, a self-transformable pH-driven membrane anchoring photosensitizer (pHMAPS) is used to realize tumor-specific accumulation and in situ PDT on tumor cell membrane to maximize the therapeutic potency. It is found that pHMAPS was able to form α-helix structure under acidic condition (pH 6.5 or 5.5), while remain random coil at normal pH of 7.4. This pH-driven secondary structure switch enables the successful insertion of pHMAPS into membrane lipid bilayer, especially for cancerous cell membrane in the acidic tumor microenvironment. Under laser irradiation, cytotoxic ROS is generated in the immediate vicinity of cell membrane, resulting in superior cell killing effect in vitro and significant inhibition of tumor growth in vivo. Importantly, benefited from this membrane-specific PDT, tumor growth-induced hepatic, pulmonary, as well as osseous metastases of breast cancer cells are also retarded after PDT treatment. Thus, the membrane localized PDT by pHMAPS provides a simple but effective strategy to enhance the medical performance of photosensitizing agents in cancer therapy. Membrane-anchoring photodynamic therapy: A pH-driven membrane-anchoring photodynamic therapy is developed to inhibit tumor growth and metastasis. With the formation of α-helix structure in tumor acidic microenvironment, pH-driven membrane anchoring photosensitizer can rapidly insert into tumor cell membrane and the membrane localized photodynamic therapy (PDT) directly induces significant membrane damage, giving rise to superior cell killing effect and enhanced PDT.

Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi

DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201702122

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.