A Two-Dimensional Biodegradable Niobium Carbide (MXene) for Photothermal Tumor Eradication in NIR-I and NIR-II Biowindows
Authors: Chen Dai
Yu Chen
Han Lin
Jianlin Shi
Shanshan Gao
Journal: Journal of the American Chemical Society (2017)
Discipline: CHEMISTRY
Keywords: ceramics-based materials; bone scaffolds; hard-tissue engineering; cancer phototherapeutic applications; near-infrared light
Affiliations: State
Key Laboratory of High Performance Ceramics and Superfine Microstructures, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200050, P. R. China, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, P. R. China

Abstract:  Conventionally, ceramics-based materials, fabricated by high-temperature solid-phase reaction and sintering, are preferred as bone scaffolds in hard-tissue engineering because of their tunable biocompatibility and mechanical properties. However, their possible biomedical applications have rarely been considered, especially the cancer phototherapeutic applications in both the first and second near-infrared light (NIR-I and NIR-II) biowindows. In this work, we explore, for the first time as far as we know, a novel kind of 2D niobium carbide (Nb2C), MXene, with highly efficient in vivo photothermal ablation of mouse tumor xenografts in both NIR-I and NIR-II windows. The 2D Nb2C nanosheets (NSs) were fabricated by a facile and scalable two-step liquid exfoliation method combining stepwise delamination and intercalation procedures. The ultrathin, lateral-nanosized Nb2C NSs exhibited extraordinarily high photothermal conversion efficiency (36.4% at NIR-I and 45.65% at NIR-II), as well as high photothermal stability. The Nb2C NSs intrinsically feature unique enzyme-responsive biodegradability to human myeloperoxidase, low phototoxicity, and high biocompatibility. Especially, these surface-engineered Nb2C NSs present highly efficient in vivo photothermal ablation and eradication of tumor in both NIR-I and NIR-II biowindows. This work significantly broadens the application prospects of 2D MXenes by rationally designing their compositions and exploring related physiochemical properties, especially on phototherapy of cancer. 

Retracted: No

PubPeer comments:
 Dupliated but rotated images in Fig. 5d as shown in yellow box. ![file] , 
 Dear Cyrtanthus Leptosiphon. Thank you very much for reminding us the mistake. We apologize for such an unconscious error, and have carefully checked our original data, and found that this error was caused by our carelessness in capturing the representative confocal images and integrating these figures. We will send the correct images and the raw data to the publisher for the error correction. These images are the additional qualitative demonstration intuitively showing the near-infrared light-responsive photothermal effect of niobium carbide in vitro. Fortunately, the image substitutions will not affect any results presented in the originally-published version, nor the corresponding text description and the conclusion of the paper. We sincerely hope that the correction of the online version and our author statement could make up for the mistake. Thank you again for helping us to find and correct this mistake. We will be more carefully to avoid such mistake. Best Regards. ,