Synthesis Of Mitochondria-targeted Near-infrared Phototheranostic Agent And Its Application In Phototherapy

In recent years,cancer phototherapy has gradually emerged as a potentially safe and effective treatment due to its minimal non-invasiveness and precise targeting of tumor sites.As the two most common phototherapy,photodynamic therapy（PDT）and photothermal therapy（PTT）have attracted extensive research interest for improving therapeutic efficacy due to the advantage of synergistic effect.Recently,researchers have developed a number of aggregation-induced emission luminogens（AIEgens）as phototheranostic agents,which are used in the research of PDT and PTT.Additionally,mitochondria-targeting ability is also very importance for improving therapeutic efficacy.However,the development of a single mitochondria-targeted AIEgens as phototheranostic agent for PDT/PTT synergistic therapy remains a challenging task.Herein,in this paper,a near-infrared phototheranostic agent（OPAT）with four positively charged A-π-D-π-A structure was synthesized through reasonable molecular design,which possesses aggregation-induced emission properties and mitochondriatargeting ability.And multifunctional OPAT nanoparticles（OPAT NPs）was constructed by encapsulating OPAT with polymer F127.Notably,OPAT NPs have specific mitochondrial-targeting capability,excellent reactive oxygen species generation for PDT,high photothermal conversion efficiency for PTT and photothermal imaging.In vitro and in vivo results demonstrate that OPAT NPs as efficient mitochondria-targeted agent can be successfully employed for the synergistic phototherapy by a single laser irradiation.Therefore,the research work in this paper not only provides a safe and effective way for the development of a single AIEgens as phototheranostic agent,but also provides a new vision for the construction of a multifunctional phototherapy platform.