Carbon nanotubes as multifunctional biological transporters and near-infrared agents for selective cancer cell destruction.

By N. W. Kam, M. O'connell, J. Wisdom, Hongjie Dai. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2005

2,189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biological systems are known to be highly transparent to 700- to 1,100-nm near-infrared (NIR) light. It is shown here that the strong optical absorbance of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in this special spectral window, an intrinsic property of SWNTs, can be used for optical stimulation of nanotubes inside living cells to afford multifunctional nanotube biological transporters. For oligonucleotides transported inside living cells by nanotubes, the oligos can translocate into cell nucleus upon endosomal rupture triggered by NIR laser pulses. Continuous NIR radiation can cause cell death because of excessive local heating of SWNT in vitro. Selective cancer cell destruction can be achieved by functionalization of SWNT with a folate moiety, selective internalization of SWNTs inside cells labeled with folate receptor tumor markers, and NIR-triggered cell death, without harming receptor-free normal cells. Thus, the transporting capabilities of carbon nanotubes combined with suitable functionalization chemistry and their intrinsic optical properties can lead to new classes of novel nanomaterials for drug delivery and cancer therapy.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5095035e441bb48c9bc77353b562bcbb12fe670

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Hongjie Dai
2. Zhuang Liu
3. Xiaohua Huang
4. M. El-Sayed
5. P. Jain
6. I. El-Sayed
7. Kevin D. Welsher
8. Xiaoyuan Chen

In Materials Chemistry

1. Hongjie Dai
2. Zhuang Liu
3. Xiaohua Huang
4. Kevin D. Welsher
5. P. Jain
6. M. El-Sayed
7. I. El-Sayed
8. S. Tabakman

Citations in the corpus

• Biomedical Applications of Graphene (2012, background): “depolarization and caspase activation leaking cytochrome C of human glioma cells in vitro than single-walled CNT [57].”
• Effects of nanomaterial physicochemical properties on in vivo toxicity (2009, neutral): “In the last few years, both SWCNT and MWCNT have been utilized as nanocarriers for parenteral drug and gene delivery and recently as targeted cancer treatments [3,59].”