Light Activated Drug Delivery Nanostructures 1
Light Activated Drug Delivery Nanostructures 1
Maria Kanelli, Neelkanth Manoj Bardhan, Morteza Sarmadi, Willian Rothwell, Shahad Alsaiari, Angela Belcher, Ana Jaklenec, Bob Langer
Koch Institute at MIT
We have been working on the development of a light-activable microsystem composed of polycaprolactone microstructures that co-encapsulate chemotherapeutic agents (e.g. doxorubicin) and molybdenum disulfide nanosheets as the phototherapeutic agent. This system can repeatedly and simultaneously provide photothermal therapy and chemotherapy to superficial tumors in a pulsatile manner and exert synergistic anticancer effects.
We performed SEM-EDS in order to identify the presence of the phototherapeutic agent in our microstructures. This phototherapeutic agent is MoS2 nanosheets and by performing SEM-EDS we can identify the molybdenum (Mo, in green) and the sulfur (S, in pink) content. The identified presence of the phototherapeutic agent (MoS2) in the microstructures confirms the ability of this system to be used for local and controlled drug delivery utilizing a switch on-off mechanism (upon near-infrared laser irradiation) for drug release, while it can also contribute to tumor thermal ablation.