Natural-Killer-Cell-Inspired Nanorobots with Aggregation-Induced Emission Characteristics for Near-Infrared-II Fluorescence-Guided Glioma Theranostics

Guanjun Deng, Xinghua Peng, Zhihong Sun, Wei Zheng, Jia Yu, Lulu Du, Huajie Chen, Ping Gong*, Pengfei Zhang*, Lintao Cai*, Ben Zhong Tang*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal Articlepeer-review

229 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Nature has always inspired robotic designs and concepts. It is conceivable that biomimic nanorobots will soon play a prominent role in medicine. The "Terminator"in the science fiction film is a cybernetic organism with living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, which inspired us to develop natural-killer-cell-mimic nanorobots with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) characteristics (NK@AIEdots) by coating a natural kill cell membrane on an AIE-active polymeric endoskeleton, PBPTV, a highly bright NIR-II AIE-active conjugated polymer. Owing to the AIE and soft-matter characteristics of PBPTV, as-prepared NK@AIEdots maintained a superior NIR-II brightness (quantum yield ∼7.9% in water) and good biocompatibility. Besides, they can serve as a tight junction (TJ) modulator to trigger an intracellular signaling cascade, causing TJ disruption and actin cytoskeleton reorganization to form an intercellular "green channel"to help them to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) silently. Furthermore, they can initiatively accumulate in glioblastoma cells in the complex brain matrix for high-contrast and through-skull tumor imaging. The tumor growth was also greatly inhibited by these NK@AIEdots under the NIR light illumination. As far as we know, the quantum yield of PBPTV is the highest among the existing NIR-II luminescent conjugated polymers. Besides, the NK-cell biomimetic nanorobots showed great potential for BBB-crossing active delivery.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)11452-11462
Number of pages11
JournalACS Nano
Volume14
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 22 Sept 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 American Chemical Society.

Keywords

  • NIR-II
  • aggregation-induced emission
  • blood-brain barrier
  • brain tumor
  • nanorobots

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