Bovine serum albumin-templated nanoplatform for magnetic resonance imaging-guided chemodynamic therapy

BACKGROUND: Nanotechnology in medicine has greatly expanded the therapeutic strategy that may be explored for cancer treatment by exploiting the specific tumor microenvironment such as mild acidity, high glutathione (GSH) concentration and overproduced hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)). Among them, tumor microenvironment responsive chemodynamic therapy (CDT) utilized the Fenton or Fenton-like reaction to produce excess hydroxyl radical (·OH) for the destruction of tumor cells. However, the produced ·OH is easily depleted by the excess GSH in tumors, which would undoubtedly impair the CDT’s efficiency. To overcome this obstacle and enhance the treatment efficiency, we design the nanoplatforms for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided CDT. RESULTS: In this study, we applied the bovine serum albumin (BSA)-templated CuS:Gd nanoparticles (CuS:Gd NPs) for MRI-guided CDT. The Cu(2+) in the CuS:Gd NPs could be reduced to Cu(+) by GSH in tumors, which further reacted with H(2)O(2) and triggered Fenton-like reaction to simultaneously generate abundant ·OH and deplete GSH for tumor enhanced CDT. Besides, the Gd(3+) in CuS:Gd NPs endowed them with excellent MRI capability, which could be used to locate the tumor site and monitor the therapy process preliminarily. CONCLUSIONS: The designed nanoplatforms offer a major step forward in CDT for effective treatment of tumors guided by MRI. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12951-019-0501-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.