School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Frontiers Science Center for Transformative Molecules, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, 200240, Shanghai, P. R. China.
Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Devices and Systems of Ministry of Education, Shenzhen University, 518060, Shenzhen, P. R. China.
Nat Commun. 2020 Apr 7;11(1):1724. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-15427-1.
Vesicular photothermal therapy agents (PTAs) are highly desirable in photothermal therapy (PTT) for their excellent light-harvesting ability and versatile hollow compartments. However, up to now, the reported vesicular PTAs are generally self-assembled from small molecules like liposomes, and polymer vesicles have seldom been used as PTAs due to the unsatisfactory photothermal conversion efficiency resulting from the irregular packing of chromophores in the vesicle membranes. Here we report a nano-sized polymer vesicle from hyperbranched polyporphyrins with favorable photothermal stability and extraordinarily high photothermal efficiency (44.1%), showing great potential in imaging-guided PTT for tumors through in vitro and in vivo experiments. These excellent properties are attributed to the in situ supramolecular polymerization of porphyrin units inside the vesicle membrane into well-organized 1D monofilaments driven by π-π stacking. We believe the supramolecular polymerization-enhanced self-assembly process reported here will shed a new light on the design of supramolecular materials with new structures and functions.
囊泡光热治疗剂（PTAs）因其优异的光捕获能力和多样的中空隔室而在光热治疗（PTT）中备受关注。然而，到目前为止，报道的囊泡 PTA 通常是由小分子自组装而成，如脂质体，而由于囊泡膜中发色团的不规则堆积导致光热转换效率不理想，聚合物囊泡很少被用作 PTA。在这里，我们报告了一种由超支化卟啉形成的纳米级聚合物囊泡，具有良好的光热稳定性和极高的光热效率（44.1%），通过体外和体内实验显示出在肿瘤成像引导 PTT 中的巨大应用潜力。这些优异的性能归因于卟啉单元在囊泡膜内通过π-π堆积原位超分子聚合形成的有序一维单丝。我们相信，这里报道的超分子聚合增强的自组装过程将为具有新结构和功能的超分子材料的设计提供新的思路。
