Activatable Near-Infrared Fluorescent Organic Nanoprobe for Hypochlorous Acid Detection in the Early Diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis

Early diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is crucial to prevent deterioration and improve the prognosis of disease outcome. However, current clinical diagnostic methods are unable to achieve accurate and early detection of RA. In this work, we designed an activatable organic nanoprobe (ONP-CySe) capable of specific and real-time imaging of ClO– in early RA. ONP-CySe comprises a near-infrared fluorescent selenomorpholine-caged cyanine dye as the sensing component and an amphiphilic triblock copolymer triphenyl phosphine derivative for mitochondria targeting. Our results showed that ONP-CySe successfully detected elevated levels of ClO– in the mitochondria of macrophages with high selectivity, low limit of detection (31.5 nM), excellent photostability, and good biocompatibility. Furthermore, ONP-CySe can also be used to monitor anti-inflammatory responses and efficacies of RA therapeutics, such as selenocysteine and methotrexate, in BALB/c mouse models. Therefore, our research proposes a universal molecular design strategy for the detection of ClO–, which holds potential for early diagnosis and drug screening for RA.