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Natural-Killer-Cell-Inspired Nanorobots with Aggregation-Induced Emission Characteristics for Near-Infrared-II Fluorescence-Guided Glioma Theranostics.

Author
Abstract
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Nature has always inspired robotic designs and concepts. It is conceivable that biomimic nanorobots will soon play a prominent role in medicine. The "Terminator" in the science fiction film is a cybernetic organism with living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, which inspired us to develop natural-killer-cell-mimic nanorobots with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) characteristics (NK@AIEdots) by coating a natural kill cell membrane on an AIE-active polymeric endoskeleton, PBPTV, a highly bright NIR-II AIE-active conjugated polymer. Owing to the AIE and soft-matter characteristics of PBPTV, as-prepared NK@AIEdots maintained a superior NIR-II brightness (quantum yield ∼7.9% in water) and good biocompatibility. Besides, they can serve as a tight junction (TJ) modulator to trigger an intracellular signaling cascade, causing TJ disruption and actin cytoskeleton reorganization to form an intercellular "green channel" to help them to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) silently. Furthermore, they can initiatively accumulate in glioblastoma cells in the complex brain matrix for high-contrast and through-skull tumor imaging. The tumor growth was also greatly inhibited by these NK@AIEdots under the NIR light illumination. As far as we know, the quantum yield of PBPTV is the highest among the existing NIR-II luminescent conjugated polymers. Besides, the NK-cell biomimetic nanorobots showed great potential for BBB-crossing active delivery.

Year of Publication
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2020
Journal
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ACS nano
Volume
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14
Issue
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9
Number of Pages
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11452-11462
Date Published
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2020
ISSN Number
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1936-0851
URL
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https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.0c03824
DOI
:
10.1021/acsnano.0c03824
Short Title
:
ACS Nano
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