A dual-targeting Fe3O4@C/ZnO-DOX-FA nanoplatform with pH-responsive drug release and synergetic chemo-photothermal antitumor in vitro and in vivo

Designing a proper intelligent platform to target cancer cells accurately and reducing its toxic side effects on normal tissues remain a challenge in medicine application. Herein, a novel dual-targeted and tumor microenvironment-triggered Fe 3 O 4 @carbon(C)/ZnO-doxorubicin (DOX) -folic acid (FA) drug delivery system with porous structure was designed and fabricated for the first time. The co-presence of Fe 3 O 4 core and FA molecules functioned successfully could successfully realize the magnetic targeting and cancer cell-specific targeting. In addition, pH-responsive ZnO and porous carbon both derived directly from zinc-2-methylimidazolate complex (Zn-ZIF) could play the roles of “gatekeeper” and photothermal agent, respectively. The former could efficiently block the drug within mesoporous in blood environment for decreasing the damage to the normal tissues and achieving the controlled DOX release in the simulated and real acidic tumor microenvironment. And the latter could exhibit the intrinsic photothermal conversion efficiency upon 638 nm laser irradiation. Therefore, the Fe 3 O 4 @C/ZnO-DOX-FA nanoplatform integrated dual targeting, controlled chemotherapy with photothermal therapy (PTT) for cancer, displaying a significantly superior synergistic anticancer efficiency both in vitro and in vivo experiments to either monotherapy. Above results suggested the prepared nanoplatforms might be a promising candidate for effectively synergetic therapeutics to cancers.