Abstract
Drug toxicity is a long-standing concern of modern medicine. A typical anti-pain/fever drug paracetamol often causes hepatotoxicity due to peroxynitrite ONOO−. Conventional blood tests fail to offer real-time unambiguous visualization of such hepatotoxicity in vivo. Here we report a luminescent approach to evaluate acute hepatotoxicity in vivo by chromophore-conjugated upconversion nanoparticles. Upon injection, these nanoprobes mainly accumulate in the liver and the luminescence of nanoparticles remains suppressed owing to energy transfer to the chromophore. ONOO− can readily bleach the chromophore and thus recover the luminescence, the presence of ONOO− in the liver leads to fast restoring of the near-infrared emission. Taking advantages of the high tissue-penetration capability of near-infrared excitation/emission, these nanoprobes achieve real-time monitoring of hepatotoxicity in living animals, thereby providing a convenient screening strategy for assessing hepatotoxicity of synthetic drugs.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 4165-4169 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Angewandte Chemie - International Edition |
Volume | 56 |
Issue number | 15 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 3 2017 |
Keywords
- biosensors
- fluorescent probes
- hepatotoxicity
- nanotechnology
- paracetamol
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Catalysis
- Chemistry(all)