The Preparation and Application of Dendrimer Modified CdTe/CdS Near Infrared Quantum Dots for Brain Cancer Cells Imaging

Abstract

The most notable obstacle of brain cancer diagnosis is the inability of delivering imaging agents across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Recently, quantum dots (QDs) has been demonstrated as an ideal image agent for brain imaging due to their ultra-small size for crossing BBB. The plolyamidoamine dendrimers modified CdTe/CdS core/shell near-infrared (NIR) region QDs was successfully synthesized in aqueous solution, and then was characterized by UV-vis absorption, photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering (DLS), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), etc. Our results reveal that the dendrimers modified CdTe/CdS QDs exhibits good water-dispersity and stable NIR fluorescence in various biological environments. In addition, this NIR QDs demonstrates a good biocompatibility and sensitive photoluminescence responses in brain tumor cell imaging. In a word, this type of dendrimers modified NIR CdTe/CdS QDs has huge potential applications in brain imaging.