Jingqin Chen, Rui Chen, Calvin V Chau, Adam C Sedgwick, Qiang Xue, Tao Chen, Silue Zeng, Ningbo Chen, Kenneth K Y Wong, Liang Song, Yaguang Ren, Jian Yang, Jonathan L Sessler, Chengbo Liu
Pancreatic cancer is highly lethal. New diagnostic and treatment modalities are desperately needed. We report here that an expanded porphyrin, cyclo[8]pyrrole (CP), with a high extinction coefficient (89.16 L/g·cm) within the second near-infrared window (NIR-II), may be formulated with an αv β3 -specific targeting peptide, cyclic-Arg-Gly-Asp (cRGD), to form cRGD-CP nanoparticles (cRGD-CPNPs) with promising NIR-II photothermal (PT) therapeutic and photoacoustic (PA) imaging properties. Studies with a ring-array PA tomography system, coupled with analysis of control nanoparticles lacking a targeting element (CPNPs), revealed that cRGD conjugation promoted the delivery of the NPs through abnormal vessels around the tumor to the solid tumor core...
February 8, 2024: Journal of the American Chemical Society