Graphene-Based Smart Nanomaterials for Photothermal Therapy

초록

Current clinical therapies for cancer treatment such as radiation therapy, chemotherapy and surgical resection have several disadvantages like destroying healthy tissues and cells to cause various side effects. Hence, in recent years, non-invasive photothermal therapy (PTT) using photothermal conversion agents (PTAs) that absorbs the energy from near-infrared (NIR) light irradiation has attracted extensive research attention to generate heat for thermal ablation of cancer cells, even though the therapeutic efficacy of PTT is still negotiated due to low photothermal conversion efficiency, poor stability of PTAs, thermal resistance of tumours, cancer recurrence and metastasis. In this field, nanomaterials capable of converting the irradiating light energy into heat have been showing promising results in various clinical tests. Over the past few years, graphene-based nanomaterials have gained a great deal of interest in this domain due to their unique structural, optical, thermal, electrical and mechanical properties. Graphene oxide (GO) and its derivatives have been widely investigated for biomedical applications such as cancer therapy, due to their high surface area, good biocompatibility, abundant oxygen-containing functional groups, excellent stability and specific optical properties. In this chapter, we briefly introduce the photothermal therapy of graphene-based nanomaterials for cancer treatment and current challenges as a well as future challenges are discussed. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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