Theranostics that combines the disease diagnosis with treatment is of promising application in the foreground of
personalized medicine to achieve a precise treatment with minimum side effects. In this work, we strategically designed a "four-in-one"
theranostic nanoplatform for realizing the desired imaging-guided
phototherapy, in which functions of fluorescent imaging, photoacoustic imaging tomography (PAT),
photothermal therapy (PTT) and
photodynamic therapy (
PDT) were implemented by bioconjugated MoS2 nanosheets. The protagonist of MoS2 is a light-harvesting material in the near-infrared (NIR) region, which would produce localized
hyperthermia at the
tumor site to trigger the
photothermal therapy effect for the
tumor ablation as well as a PAT signal to depict the
tumor concurrently upon NIR excitation. To our surprise, MoS2 has been found to be a
photosensitizer for the
cancer PDT treatment as well. Moreover,
bovine serum albumin (BSA) decoration on MoS2 has been made to improve biocompatibility, which also allowed further conjugation with a fluorescent molecule of
Cy5.5 to endow the overall nanoplatform with fluorescence imaging and monitoring features. On the basis of the above characters, great successes in
cancer imaging and
tumor photoablation were achieved in both in vitro and in vivo experiments. Innovatively, B-ultrasonography and MRI imaging were employed to monitor the elimination process of solid
tumor after treatment, which clearly revealed a liquefaction
necrosis process for rehabilitation. In short, MoS2 represents a nanoplatform of this work and manifested huge advantages in the
cancer theranostics.