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.