Development and Investigation of Ultrastable PbS/CdS/ZnS Quantum Dots for Near‐Infrared Tumor Imaging |
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| Authors: | Fuqiang Ren Blanca del Rosal So Young An Fan Yang Elisa Carrasco Antonio Benayas Jung Kwon Oh Daniel Jaque Ángeles Juarranz de la Fuente Fiorenzo Vetrone Dongling Ma |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique – énergie, Matériaux et Télécommunications, Univerisité du Québec, Varennes, Québec, Canada;2. Fluorescence Imaging Group, Departamento de Física de Materiales, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain;3. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada;4. Grupo de Dermatología Experimental, Instituto Ramón y Cajal de Investigación Sanitaria, IRYCIS, Madrid, Spain;5. Centre for Self‐Assembled Chemical Structures, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
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| Abstract: | 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. |
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| Keywords: | near‐infrared photoluminescence quantum dots tumor imaging |
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