Gold nanorods/graphene oxide nanosheets immobilized by polydopamine for efficient remotely triggered drug delivery

Abstract In this paper, a novel one-pot strategy was utilized to immobilize gold nanorods (GNRs) onto the surface of PEGylated graphene oxide (GO-PEG) via polydopamine (PDA) to fabricate GNRs/GO@PDA hybrid nanosheets. The GNRs/GO@PDA nanosheets possessed excellent photostability and photothermal conversion efficiency (36.10%), due to the robust interfacial immobilization of PDA between GNRs and GO-PEG. Besides, GNRs/GO@PDA also could be utilized to be an efficient drug nano-vehicle that possessed an excellent loading ability for anticancer drug doxorubicin hydrochloride (DOX) (86.16%). Furthermore, the drug release of hybrid nanosheets could be triggered by pH value and near-infrared (NIR) light irradiation, which could be mainly ascribed to the strong π – π stacking interaction between GNRs/GO@PDA and DOX, as well as the brilliant NIR-responsive property of GNRs/GO@PDA. It was found that GNRs/GO@PDA possessed extremely low cytotoxicity to MCF-7 cells even at 250 μg mL −1 , while GNRs/GO@PDA(DOX) showed obvious cytotoxicity at 100 μg mL −1 . Thus, this paper presents a feasible strategy to fabricate GNRs/GO hybrid nanosheets with high drug loading capacity, excellent photothermal conversion property and pH/NIR-stimuli-responsive drug delivery performance, which possesses brilliant potentials to be an efficient platform for remotely triggered drug delivery. Graphical abstract