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In vitro study of enhanced photodynamic cancer cell killing effect by nanometer-thick gold nanosheets

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Abstract

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) by near-infrared (NIR) irradiation is a promising technique for treating various cancers. Here, we reported the development of free-standing wafer-scale Au nanosheets (NSs) that exhibited an impressive PDT effect. The Au NSs were synthesized by ionic layer epitaxy at the air-water interface with a uniform thickness in the range from 2 to 8.5 nm. These Au NSs were found very effective in generating singlet oxygen under NIR irradiation. In vitro cellular study showed that the Au NSs had very low cytotoxicity and high PDT efficiency due to their uniform 2D morphology. Au NSs could kill cancer cells after 5 min NIR irradiation with little heat generation. This performance is comparable to using 10 times mass loading of Au nanoparticles (NPs). This work suggests that two-dimensional (2D) Au NSs could be a new type of biocompatible nanomaterial for PDT of cancer with an extraordinary photon conversion and cancer cell killing efficiency.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Army Research Office (No. W911NF-16-1-0198), the National Science Foundation (No. DMR-1709025), and National Institutes of Health (Nos. R01EB0213360, 1R21EB027857, and P30CA014520). Diffraction data was collected at ChemMatCARS Sector 15, which is principally supported by the Divisions of Chemistry and Materials Research, National Science Foundation, under grant number NSF/CHE-1834750. Use of the Advanced Photon Source, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory, was supported by the U.S. DOE (No. DEAC02-06CH11357).

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  1. Ziyi Zhang and Dalong Ni contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, 53706, USA

    Ziyi Zhang, Fei Wang, Xin Yin, Lazarus N. German, Yizhan Wang, Jun Li & Xudong Wang

  2. Department of Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, 53705, USA

    Dalong Ni, Shreya Goel & Weibo Cai

  3. University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, Madison, Wisconsin, 53705, USA

    Dalong Ni & Weibo Cai

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  1. Ziyi Zhang
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  2. Dalong Ni
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Correspondence to Weibo Cai or Xudong Wang.

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Zhang, Z., Ni, D., Wang, F. et al. In vitro study of enhanced photodynamic cancer cell killing effect by nanometer-thick gold nanosheets. Nano Res. 13, 3217–3223 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2990-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2990-7

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