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Development and Investigation of Ultrastable PbS/CdS/ZnS Quantum Dots for Near‐Infrared Tumor Imaging
Author(s) -
Ren Fuqiang,
del Rosal Blanca,
An So Young,
Yang Fan,
Carrasco Elisa,
Benayas Antonio,
Oh Jung Kwon,
Jaque Daniel,
de la Fuente Ángeles Juarranz,
Vetrone Fiorenzo,
Ma Dongling
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
particle and particle systems characterization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.877
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1521-4117
pISSN - 0934-0866
DOI - 10.1002/ppsc.201600242
Subject(s) - quantum dot , photoluminescence , luminescence , nanoparticle , infrared , fluorescence , materials science , dispersion (optics) , preclinical imaging , quantum yield , nanotechnology , in vivo , optoelectronics , optics , microbiology and biotechnology , biology , physics
Achieving bright, reliable, robust, and stable probes for in vivo imaging is becoming extremely urgent for the cancer imaging research community. To date very few works have reported on elucidating in the varied and chemically complex biological milieu. The authors report detailed investigations of the synthesis of near‐infrared, water dispersive, strongly luminescent, and highly stable PbS/CdS/ZnS core/shell/shell quantum dots (QDs). These QDs are extremely stable, they could keep their initial morphology, dispersion status, and photoluminescence (PL) in phosphate buffered saline buffer for as long as 14 months. The QDs also show excellent photostability and could keep ≈80% of their initial PL intensity after 1 h continuous, strong UV illumination. More interestingly, they show negligible toxicity to cultured cells even at high QDs concentration. Given these outstanding properties, the QDs are explored for in vivo, tumor imaging in mice. With one order of magnitude lower QD concentration (0.04 mg mL –1 ), significantly weaker laser intensity (0.04 W cm –2 vs ≈1 W cm –2 ), and considerably shorter signal integration time (≤1 ms vs hundreds of ms) as compared to the best reported rare earth doped nanoparticles, the QDs show high emission intensity even at injection depth of ≈2.5 mm.