Yang Zengming, Zhang Zhijun, Lei Ziqiang, Wang Dong, Ma Hengchang, Tang Ben Zhong
Key Laboratory of Eco-functional Polymer Materials of the Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Eco-environmental Polymer Materials of Gansu Province, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, China.
Center for AIE Research, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
ACS Nano. 2021 Apr 27;15(4):7328-7339. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.1c00585. Epub 2021 Apr 2.
Precise molecular engineering is the most fundamental and even a great challenging task for the development of small organic fluorophores used as phototheranostic agents in multimodal imaging-guided synergistic therapy. To the best of our knowledge, there have been no previous reports regarding the fine fabrication of molecular structure from a proof-of-concept study, providing a single molecule with all phototheranostic modalities. Herein, an electron donating-accepting (D-A) system is constructed by using triphenylamine derivatives as donors and diverse electron-deficient partners as acceptors, yielding aggregation-induced emission luminogens with tunable emission wavelength (up to 933 nm) and light absorption capability (ε up to 6.9 × 10 M cm). Notably, by integrating the spin-orbit coupling-promoted carbonyl group and the strong stretching vibrations of -CN to the D-A systems, a highly performing phototheranostic agent, namely, MeTIC, is constructed. When encapsulating MeTIC into nanovehicles, the obtained MeTIC nanoparticles show excellent performance in multimodality theranostics for cancer treatment. This work is expected to provide an organic phototheranostic agent designing principle for potential clinical trials.
精确的分子工程对于开发用于多模态成像引导协同治疗的有机小分子荧光团而言是最基本且极具挑战性的任务。据我们所知，此前尚无关于从概念验证研究出发精细构建分子结构，从而提供具有所有光诊疗模式的单一分子的报道。在此，通过使用三苯胺衍生物作为供体和多种缺电子基团作为受体构建了一个供体-受体（D-A）体系，得到了发射波长可调（高达933 nm）且光吸收能力强（ε高达6.9×10 M cm）的聚集诱导发光体。值得注意的是，通过将自旋轨道耦合促进的羰基和-CN的强拉伸振动整合到D-A体系中，构建了一种高性能的光诊疗剂，即MeTIC。当将MeTIC封装到纳米载体中时，所得到的MeTIC纳米颗粒在癌症治疗的多模态诊疗中表现出优异的性能。这项工作有望为潜在的临床试验提供一种有机光诊疗剂的设计原则。
