1 Introduction
Due to their serious metastasis and secondary infection, cancers have
been the leading cause of human death. The general treatments of cancer
include surgery[1, 2], chemotherapy[3, 4] and radiotherapy[5,
6], and so on. With the rapid development of nanotechnology and
materials science, nano-drug delivery systems have caused more and more
attention in the cancers’ diagnosis[7] and treatment[8]. Among
them, they include carbon nanomaterials[9-11], silica
nanoparticles[12-14], gold nanoparticles[15-18] and so on. Among
them, carbon nanomaterials have attracted extensive attention due to
excellent water-solubility, high biocompatibility and low toxicity. It
is worth to mention that nanoparticles below 200nm which have large
specific surface area and drug loading capacity, could cause endocytosis
and be taken up the cancer cells more easily, thus have a higher
therapeutic efficiency. However, it is still a great challenge to
prepare well-dispersed carbon nanoparticles (< 200nm) with
novel structures. On the other hand, glucose is considered to be an
excellent raw material for preparing carbon nanomaterials, not only
glucose is nontoxic and abundant bio-resource, but also it has been
proved that the functional glycosylation groups retained on the surface
of obtained carbon materials could help them to penetrate the cell
membrane barrier more flexibly[19].
In recent years, stimuli responsive controlled nano-drug delivery
systems have been proposed to improve the efficiency of treatment, such
as temperature stimuli[20, 21], magnetism stimuli[22] and pH
stimuli[23]. For example, Qi group developed a novel
magnetic-targeted pH-responsive doxorubicin hydrochloride (DOX) carrier
based on mesoporous NiFe2O4 nanospheres.
The effective drug release amounts could increase more than 60% at pH
4.0 than that at neutral conditions within 48 h. Yang group prepared a
novel multifunctional WS2-IO@MS-PEG nanoscale platform
[24]. Stimulated by NIR laser, the photothermal effect of
WS2 would trigger high efficiency release of DOX loaded
in the platform, thereby lead to an increased killing efficiency for
cancer cells. Darwin K. and his colleague synthesized chitosan - and
nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dots with high drug carrying capacity
and pH-controlled sustained drug release, which showed anticancer
effects at the low concentration against lung cancer cell loading
DOX[25]. At present, it is still a considerable challenge to obtain
novel responsive nano-platforms with simple fabrication, good
biocompatibility and high treatment efficiency.
In this paper, novel rod-like carbon nanomaterials (RCNs) were prepared
by soft template hydrothermal method using glucose as raw materials. A
series of characterizations were performed, which showed that the
prepared carbon nanoparticles had excellent drug-loading capacity and
high photothermal efficiency, in addition to good water solubility,
stability and biocompatibility. After that, RCNs we used to load DOX for
integrated photothermal/chemotherapy for cancer, which demonstrated good
treatment efficiency. Our approach not only provided a new-typed carbon
nano platform for drug delivery, but also supplied a new approach for
practical cancer therapy in the future.