The oxygen-consuming property of photodynamic therapy
(PDT) affects
its effects and aggravates tumor hypoxia, thus upregulating the vascular
endothelial growth factor (VEGF) to exacerbate tumor metastasis and
lead to treatment failure. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the
dynamic changes in the factors related to PDT and tumor development
trends in real time, thus helping to improve PDT efficiency. This
study fabricated a fluorescent probe, TPE-2HPro, and a fluorescein-labeled
aptamer probe, FAM-AptamerVEGF, to detect hydrogen peroxide
(H2O2) and VEGF through the photoinduced electron-transfer
effect and the specific affinity of the aptamer to VEGF, respectively.
The two probes were loaded into the inner pores and absorbed on the
surface of polydopamine coating-wrapped mesoporous silica nanoparticles
(MSN@PDA) to construct the dual-probe-loaded system, MSNTH@PDAApt, which was kept stable in fetal bovine serum (FBS)
solution and achieved pH-responsive release behavior, thus helping
to increase the accumulation of the two probes in tumor cells. The
dichloroacetic acid-mediated in vitro antitumor tests
showed that the changing trends of H2O2 and
VEGF levels were consistent with the results of related mechanism
studies and could be monitored by MSNTH@PDAApt. The in vitro chlorin e6 (Ce6)-mediated PDT treatment
demonstrated that when the illumination condition was 650 nm, 50 mW/cm2 for 10 min, cells were more inclined to metastasis and invasion
rather than death due to a substantial increase in VEGF expression
at the low Ce6 concentrations. With the increase of the Ce6 concentration,
the growth of the H2O2 level gradually exceeded
that of VEGF, and the reactive oxygen species (ROS)-mediated cell
death dominated when the Ce6 concentration was about 2 times its IC50 values. Besides, hypoxia also affected the H2O2 and VEGF changes. These results demonstrated that MSNTH@PDAApt could precisely monitor and assess the
tumor development trends during PDT treatment, thus helping improve
the treatment effect.