Hydrogenated Oxide Material for Self‐Targeting and Automatic‐Degrading Photothermal Tumor Therapy in the NIR‐II Bio‐Window
Qing Zhu, Wei Jiang, Ke Ye, Shunru Jin, Wang Dong, Songde Liu, Guozhen Zhang, Chao Tian, Yi Luo, Yucai Wang, Jun Jiang
Abstract
Abstract Developing photothermal agents (PTAs) for tumor therapy has three prerequisites: selectively targeting tumors, efficiently converting near‐infrared (NIR) photoenergy to heat, and degrading after the cure. These make up a combination rarely found in one material. Here a metal‐acid treatment is reported to hydrogenate metal oxide, bestowing the produced H x MoO 3 with metal‐like electronic structure which enables harvesting NIR‐II light (1000−1350 nm wavelength). Importantly, created by putting acid protons into oxide, the H x MoO 3 nanomaterial can resist attacking from protons in acids but is vulnerable to hydroxyl ions in alkaline. After entering biological organism, H x MoO 3 PTAs persist long in acidic tumor microenvironment (TME, extracellular pH 6.5–6.9) while degrade quickly under the normal physiological environment (pH 7.2−7.4), naturally causing tumor‐selective accumulation. Under 1064 nm NIR‐II illumination, the H x MoO 3 achieves a high photothermal conversion efficiency of 60.9%, leading to a high tumor inhibition rate of ≈97.25%. Such a novel PTAs integrates merits of metal and oxide, opening a door of smart photothermal therapy with self‐adaptive tumor‐accumulation and automatic degradation after tumor hyperthermia.