Traditional
cancer-therapeutic modalities such as
chemotherapy suffer from the low therapeutic efficiency and severe side effects. The emerging nanocatalytic
therapy could in-situ catalyze the endogenous substances into highly toxic species and then efficiently kill the
cancer cells, but the lack of high-performance nanocatalysts hinders their broad clinical translation. In this work, we have successfully developed, for the first time, nanosized zero-valence crystalized
iron nanoparticles for in-situ triggering nanocatalytic Fenton reaction within tumor microenvironment to produce large amounts of
hydroxyl radicals and subsequently kill the
cancer cells, which could be further synergistically enhanced by either photonic
hyperthermia or magnetic
hyperthermia as assisted by these
iron nanoparticles acting as photothermal-conversion or magnetothermal-conversion nanoagents, respectively. Especially, the excellent magnetic performance of these zero-valence crystallized
iron nanoparticles has achieved both in vitro and in vivo contrast-enhance magnetic resonance imaging for potentially guiding the photonic/magnetic
hyperthermia-synergistic nanocatalytic
cancer therapy. This work not only provides the new type of
iron-based nanoparticles for biomedical application, but also demonstrates the high efficiency of nanocatalytic
cancer therapy as assisted by both photonic and magnetic
hyperthermia.