Antimonene with two-orders-of-magnitude improved stability for high-performance cancer theranostics

Although the antimonene (AM) nanomaterial is recently emerging as a new photothermal therapy (PTT) agent, its rapid degradation in physiological medium immensely limits its direct utilization. To this end, we herein engineered AM by the cooperation of dimension optimization, size control, and cell membrane (CM) camouflage. Compared with traditional AM nanosheets, the resulting AM nanoparticles (similar to 55 nm) cloaked with the CM (denoted as CmNPs) exhibited significantly improved stability and increased photothermal efficacy as well as superior tumor targeting capacity. After intravenous injection, the CmNPs enabled satisfactory photoacoustic/ photothermal multimodal imaging at tumor sites. Meanwhile, the PTT together with the newly explored function of photodynamic therapy (PDT) achieved a potent combination therapy with few side effects. The maximized theranostic performance thus strongly recommends CmNPs as a safe and highly reliable modality for anticancer therapy.