Synthesis of porous gadolinium oxide nanosheets for cancer therapy and magnetic resonance imaging

doi:10.1016/j.matlet.2020.127375

Materials Letters

Volume 265, 15 April 2020, 127375

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matlet.2020.127375 Get rights and content

Highlights

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The porous gadolinium oxide nanosheets were prepared through a two-step colloidal synthesis method.
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The porous gadolinium oxide nanosheets exhibited a promising pH-responsive drug release behavior for cancer therapy.
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The porous gadolinium oxide nanosheets could be used as an efficient contrast agent for magnetic resonance imaging.

Abstract

Porous nanomaterials have great potential in biomedical applications due to their unique structure and properties. Herein, we demonstrated the synthesis of porous gadolinium oxide nanosheets (Gd₂O₃ NSs) with a colloidal synthesis method. The porous Gd₂O₃ NSs exhibited a promising pH-responsive drug release behavior for cancer chemotherapy and can be used as an efficient contrast agent for magnetic resonance (MR) imaging.

Introduction

Cancer is still a major life-threating disease to human health in the world [1]. Chemotherapy has been clinically accepted as one of the important strategies for cancer treatment [2], [3], [4]. However, there are several inevitable drawbacks in chemotherapeutic agents, including low cellular uptake efficiency and many side effects [5]. Compared with the conventional chemotherapy, nanomaterials-based drug delivery has become a promising approach for enhancing the efficacy of the chemotherapy [6], [7], [8], [9]. Recently, pH-responsive system has been approved as an efficient stimuli-responsive strategy for on demand drug delivery [10], [11]. Various nanomaterials have attracted much attention in drug delivery due to their high surface-to-volume ratio and favorable physico-chemical characteristics [12], [13]. Nanoporous structures have great potential in gas separation and storage, sensing and drug delivery, due to the beneficial properties such as large surface area, surface functionalities and adjustable compositions [14]. In drug delivery, the porous nanomaterials have also exhibited high efficacy to cancer cell death after anticancer drug delivery and release [15].

Lanthanide-based nanomaterials have attracted tremendous attention in diagnosis, imaging and therapy, owing to their unique physical properties [16], [17]. Gadolinium possesses unpaired 4f electrons and a huge electron magnetic moment, which has been used as magnetic resonance (MR) contrast agent for imaging [18]. Now, there are lots of gadolinium-based nanomaterials, such as GdF₃, NaGdF₄ and Gd₂O₃, have been investigated for various biomedical applications [19], [20], [21]. However, the porous gadolinium oxides nanosheets (NSs) have not been explored yet for biomedical applications.

Herein, we report the synthesis of porous Gd₂O₃ NSs through a two-step colloidal synthesis method. After surface modification by polyetherimide (PEI) & polyethylene glycol (PEG), the as-obtained porous Gd₂O₃ NSs were stable in the aqueous solution, showing a high doxorubicin (DOX) drug loading capacity (Fig. 1). Furthermore, the porous Gd₂O₃ NSs also exhibits promising pH-responsive drug release behavior and MR imaging applications.

Section snippets

Experimental

The porous Gd₂O₃ NSs were prepared by two-step colloidal synthesis method. Firstly, we synthesized Gd₂O₃ NSs using thermal decomposition with surfactant, followed by etching with tri-octyl phosphine oxide (TOPO) to obtain porous Gd₂O₃ NSs, and the synthesis details are delineated in the supplementary material (SI). The morphologies were characterized by a Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) (Hitachi HT7700, Japan). The crystal structure was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) (Rigaku

Results and discussion

The Gd₂O₃ NSs were prepared by thermal decomposition (Fig. S1). The porous Gd₂O₃ NSs could be obtained through the acid etching of TOPO. The potential mechanism of etching is similar to acid etching [22]. In brief, TOPO contains weak acids such as alkylphosphonic acids which could etch gadolinium oxide to generate vacancies. Besides, alkylphosphonic acids can coordinate to the Gd cations and form gadolinium-phosphonate complexes, which can be dissolved into solution to produce porous gadolinium

Conclusions

In summary, we have successfully prepared the porous Gd₂O₃ NSs using a two-step colloidal synthesis method. The as-obtained porous NSs with a large surface area exhibit a promising pH-responsive drug release behavior, which can efficiently kill the cancer cells. Moreover, the porous Gd₂O₃ NSs also can be used as an efficient contrast agent. This work introduces a novel approach to constructing multifunctional platforms based on the porous Gd₂O₃ NSs, which perform an ascendant cancer therapy.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Meng Luo: Investigation, Writing - orginal draft. Lingling Xu: Data curation. Jiale Xia: Formal analysis. Hongyang Zhao: Visualization. Yaping Du: Supervision. Bo Lei: Funding acquisition and supervision, writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51872224), Key Laboratory of Shaanxi Province for Craniofacial Precision Medicine Research, College of Stomatology, Xi’an Jiaotong University (Grant No. 2018LHM-KFKT004).

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Synthesis of porous gadolinium oxide nanosheets for cancer therapy and magnetic resonance imaging

Highlights

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Experimental

Results and discussion

Conclusions

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Declaration of Competing Interest

Acknowledgements

Blood

Biomaterials

J. Control Release

CA Cancer J. Clin.

Nature

Nat. Rev. Cancer

ACS Nano

ACS Nano

Small

Adv. Mater.

Nano Lett.