Light- and Ultrasound-activated Reactive Oxygen Species Sensitizers for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Currently wide-spread social-impact diseases such as cancer and bacterial infections still not only actively impact on people’s health and their social activity but bring serious problems to the economy of entire countries. It has been firmly established that molecules, micro- and nanoparticles, which generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) under electromagnetic and ultrasound waves, are perfect weapons for fighting against solid tumors and bacterial infections. This fact strongly motivates us to search for new molecular and nanostructured ROS sensitizers and study their photo- and sonocatalytic activity.
In this work, we demonstrate photo- and sonodynamic activity of molecular and nanostructured ROS sensitizers under UV-VIS electromagnetic waves and low-intensity 20 kHz ultrasound. We show that ROS generation efficiency of such molecules as chlorine e6, Al-sulphophtalocyanine, pheophorbide a, and tetraphenylporphyrin, and nanostructured sensitizers as titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO2 NPs) can be significantly enhanced in combination with semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) because of energy and charge transfer. We propose new biocompatible core/shell ROS nanosensitizers based on ternary AIS quantum dots (QDs) and nanostructured titanium dioxide shell which can efficiently generate ROS under visible light and low-intensity 20 kHz ultrasound. We demonstrate the activation of our structures with electromagnetic waves of visible range and ultrasound, which leads to tumor and bacterial cell degradation due to efficient ROS generation. Our results clearly reveal the huge prospects for improving photo- and sonodynamic therapy of solid tumors and bacterial infections due to implementation of nanostructured ROS sensitizers.


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Speaker

Anna Orlova
ITMO University
Russia

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