Early diagnosis remains highly important for efficient cancer treatment, and hence, there is significant interest in the development of effective imaging strategies. This work reports a new multimodal bioimaging metho...Early diagnosis remains highly important for efficient cancer treatment, and hence, there is significant interest in the development of effective imaging strategies. This work reports a new multimodal bioimaging method for accurate and rapid diagnosis of cancer cells by introducing aqueous Fe^2+ and Zn^2+ ions into cancer cells (i.e., HeLa, U87, and HepG2 cancer cells). We found that the biocompatible metal ions Fe^2+ and Zn^2+ forced the cancer cells to spontaneously synthesize fluorescent ZnO nanoclusters and magnetic Fe3O4 nanoclusters. These clusters could then be used for multimodal cancer imaging by combining fluorescence imaging with magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography imaging. Meanwhile, for normal cells (i.e., L02) and tissues, neither fluorescence nor any other obvious difference could be detected between pre- and post-injection. This multimodal bioimaging strategy based on the in situ biosynthesized Zn&Fe oxide nanoclusters might therefore be useful for early cancer diagnosis and therapy.展开更多
基金This work is supported by the National High-tech R&D Program of China (No. 2015AA020502) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 81325011, 21327902 and 21175020). M. S. acknowledges support from the NSF-PREM program (No, DRM-1523588).
文摘Early diagnosis remains highly important for efficient cancer treatment, and hence, there is significant interest in the development of effective imaging strategies. This work reports a new multimodal bioimaging method for accurate and rapid diagnosis of cancer cells by introducing aqueous Fe^2+ and Zn^2+ ions into cancer cells (i.e., HeLa, U87, and HepG2 cancer cells). We found that the biocompatible metal ions Fe^2+ and Zn^2+ forced the cancer cells to spontaneously synthesize fluorescent ZnO nanoclusters and magnetic Fe3O4 nanoclusters. These clusters could then be used for multimodal cancer imaging by combining fluorescence imaging with magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography imaging. Meanwhile, for normal cells (i.e., L02) and tissues, neither fluorescence nor any other obvious difference could be detected between pre- and post-injection. This multimodal bioimaging strategy based on the in situ biosynthesized Zn&Fe oxide nanoclusters might therefore be useful for early cancer diagnosis and therapy.