Abstract
Novel near-infrared contrast agents based on the quaterrylene structure were strategically developed and tested for high photo-stability. Both a dendrimeric quaterrylene molecule, QR-G2-COOH, and a small molecule cationic quaterrylene dye, QR-4PyC4, remain optically stable and continue to generate a competitive photoacoustic response when irradiated by short near-infrared laser pulses for a relatively long time in an in-vitro cell study, unlike indocyanine green that rapidly decreases photoacoustic signal amplitude. The small molecule dye, QR-4PyC4 exhibits not only significantly higher cellular uptake rate than QR-G2-COOH and indocyanine green, but also low toxicity at a concentration of up to 10 μM. The dendrimeric dye, QR-G2-COOH that has surface functional groups available for conjugation with targeting and therapeutic agents shows the highest photoacoustic amplitude with high optical stability. Therefore, QR-4PyC4 can be a promising universal, sensitive and reliable photoacoustic contrast agent and QR-G2-COOH has great potential as a nano-platform with stable photoacoustic imaging capability.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1012-1019 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Materials Science and Engineering C |
| Volume | 93 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Dec 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018
Keywords
- Cellular uptake
- Hydrophilic
- Near infrared dye
- Photoacoustics
- Photostable
- Quaterrylene structure