Biconcave Carbon Nanodisks for Enhanced Drug Accumulation and Chemo‐Photothermal Tumor Therapy

Abstract

Abstract It is considered a significant challenge to construct nanocarriers that have high drug loading capacity and can overcome physiological barriers to deliver efficacious amounts of drugs to solid tumors. Here, the development of a safe, biconcave carbon nanodisk to address this challenge for treating breast cancer is reported. The nanodisk demonstrates fluorescent imaging capability, an exceedingly high loading capacity (947.8 mg g −1 , 94.78 wt%) for doxorubicin (DOX), and pH‐responsive drug release. It exhibits a higher uptake rate by tumor cells and greater accumulation in tumors in a mouse model than its carbon nanosphere counterpart. In addition, the nanodisk absorbs and transforms near‐infrared (NIR) light to heat, which enables simultaneous NIR‐responsive drug release for chemotherapy and generation of thermal energy for tumor cell destruction. Notably, this NIR‐activated dual therapy demonstrates a near complete suppression of tumor growth in a mouse model of triple‐negative breast cancer when DOX‐loaded nanodisks are administered systemically.