अमूर्त

Asia Pacific Nano Congress 2019: Carbon Dots in Nanomedicine

Roger M Leblanc

Carbon Dots (CDs) with size less than 10 nm have recently triggered great attention in the research of materials science and engineering due to their unique properties. They have been widely explored for applications for printing, bio imaging, drug delivery, thermoelectric materials, photocatalysis and biomedical engineering. These CDs were prepared from both top-down and bottom-up strategies and rigorously characterized by spectroscopy (UV-vis, fluorescence, FTIR and XPS), microscopy (AFM and TEM) and other (e.g., mass spectroscopy, zeta potential, etc.) commonly used techniques. A major medical challenge one faces to treat Central Nervous System (CNS) related diseases is to cross the blood-brain barrier. Recently, the in vivo experimental observations suggested that plenty of CDs could enter the CNS of zebrafish and rats with different mechanisms. Thanks to the abundant presence of carboxylic acids on the surface, CDs are easily conjugated with transferrin and anticancer drugs Doxorubicin. The system was proved to be an effective drug delivery system for the delivery of doxorubicin into cancerous cells. The study has shown that CDs with low quantum yield dark bind to calcified bone structures of live zebrafish larvae with high affinity and selectively. Binding resulted in a strong enhancement of photoluminescence that was not observed in other tissues, including non-calcified endochondral elements.