Nanocarbons
show great promise for establishing the next generation of Joule heating
systems, but suffer from the limited maximum temperature due to precociously
convective heat dissipation from electrothermal system to surrounding
environment. Here we introduce a strategy to eliminate such convective
heat transfer by inserting highly stable and conductive microcapsules
into the electrothermal structures. The microcapsule is composed of
encapsulated long-chain alkanes and graphene oxide/carbon nanotube
hybrids as core and shell material, respectively. Multiform carbon
nanotubes in the microspheres stabilize the capsule shell to resist
volume-change-induced rupture during repeated heating/cooling process,
and meanwhile enhance the thermal conductance of encapsulated alkanes
which facilitates an expeditious heat exchange. The resulting microcapsules
can be homogeneously incorporated in the nanocarbon-based electrothermal
structures. At a dopant of 5%, the working temperature can be enhanced
by 30% even at a low voltage and moderate temperature, which indicates
a great value in daily household applications. Therefore, the stable
and conductive microcapsule may serve as a versatile and valuable
dopant for varieties of heat generation systems.
Combining chemo-therapeutics with immune checkpoint inhibitors facilitates killing cancer cells and activating the immune system through inhibiting immune escape. However, their treatment effects remain limited due to the compromised accumulation of both drugs and inhibitors in certain tumor tissues. Herein, a new poly (acrylamide-
co
-acrylonitrile-
co
-vinylimidazole-
co
-bis(2-methacryloyl) oxyethyl disulfide) (PAAVB) polymer-based intelligent platform with controllable upper critical solution temperature (UCST) was used for the simultaneous delivery of paclitaxel (PTX) and curcumin (CUR). Additionally, a hyaluronic acid (HA) layer was coated on the surface of PAAVB NPs to target the CD44-overexpressed tumor cells. The proposed nanomedicine demonstrated a gratifying accumulation in tumor tissue and uptake by cancer cells. Then, the acidic microenvironment and high level of glutathione (GSH) in cancer cells could spontaneously decrease the UCST of polymer, leading to the disassembly of the NPs and rapid drug release at body temperature without extra-stimuli. Significantly, the released PTX and CUR could induce the immunogenic cell death (ICD) to promote adaptive anti-tumor immunogenicity and inhibit immunosuppression through suppressing the activity of indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1) enzyme respectively. Therefore, the synergism of this intelligent nanomedicine can suppress primary breast tumor growth and inhibit their lung metastasis.
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