Multifunctional Nanorobot System for Active Therapeutic Delivery and Synergistic Chemo-photothermal Therapy

Abstract

Nanorobots are safe and exhibit powerful functionalities, including delivery, therapy, and diagnosis. Therefore, they are in high demand for the development of new cancer therapies. Although many studies have contributed to the progressive development of the nanorobot system for anticancer drug delivery, these systems still face some critical limitations, such as potentially toxic materials in the nanorobots, unreasonable sizes for passive targeting, and the lack of several essential functions of the nanorobot for anticancer drug delivery including sensing, active targeting, controlling drug release, and sufficient drug loading capacity. Here, we developed a multifunctional nanorobot system capable of precise magnetic control, sufficient drug loading for chemotherapy, light-triggered controlled drug release, light absorption for photothermal therapy, enhanced magnetic resonance imaging, and tumor sensing. The developed nanorobot system exhibits an <i>in vitro</i> synergetic antitumor effect of photothermal therapy and chemotherapy and outstanding tumor-targeting efficiency in both <i>in vitro</i> and <i>in vivo</i> environments. The results of this study encourage further explorations of an efficient active drug delivery system for cancer treatment and the development of nanorobot systems for other biomedical applications.