No abstract

Therapeutic nanocatalysis has emerged as an intriguing strategy for efficient cancer‐specific therapy, but the traditional inorganic nanocatalysts suffer from low catalytic efficiency and difficulty in biodegradation, hindering their further clinical translation. Herein, a tumor microenvironment‐triggered, biodegradable and biocompatible nanocatalyst employing 2D hydroxide nanosheet is presented, and is shown to have high catalytic capacity to efficiently produce abundant hydroxyl radicals under the tumor microenvironment and consequently kill tumor cells selectively. A polyethylene glycol (PEG)‐conjugated Fe2+‐containing hydroxide nanosheet is successfully constructed via a facile but efficient bottom‐up approach that concurrently realizes nanosheet synthesis and PEGylation. Importantly, the nanosheets are featured with high catalytic activity to disproportionate H2O2 in tumors, and consequently generate abundant hydroxyl radicals at a high reaction rate under tumorous acidic condition; the highly toxic hydroxyl radicals, as a result, cause the death of tumor cells in vitro and suppress the tumor growth in vivo without the use of any supplementary toxic agent, only with the biocompatible nanocatalysts. Meanwhile, the desirable biodegradation and biocompatibility of the hydroxide nanosheet render a high degree of safety to the organism. Therefore, this work provides the first paradigm of biodegradable 2D nanocatalytic platform with concurrently high catalytic‐therapeutic performance and biosafety for efficient tumor‐specific treatment.

2D nanomaterials represent one of the next‐generation biomaterials with versatile physicochemical advantages that allow for diverse biomedical applications in disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. In particular, layered double hydroxide (LDH) nanoparticles, as a typical 2D nanomaterial, have recently shown unprecedented advances in controllable and simplified chemical construction, versatile surface engineering, and comprehensive biological investigation. To realize in vivo biomedical applications, recent efforts have been substantially devoted to a few critical aspects of LDH nanomedicine including nanoparticle stability in physiological environments, accumulation at the disease‐targeted site, selective biological response to the nanoparticle, systematic biosafety examination, integration with multiple diagnostic and therapeutic modalities, and the adjuvant activity and suitability for gene‐based and protein‐based vaccines, which are herein comprehensively reviewed. The challenges and future development strategies of LDH nanomedicine are also discussed toward practical biomedical applications to benefit patients.

No abstract

No abstract