Three birds with one stone: oxygen self-supply engineering palladium nanocluster/titanium carbide hybrid for single-NIR laser-triggered synergistic photodynamic-photothermal therapy.

As a key branch of the cross-discipline biophotonics, phototherapy, including photodynamic therapy (PDT), and photothermal therapy (PTT), is promising in biomedicine and visible light-driving PDT has been applied to clinical treatment. However, extensive applications of phototherapy are limited by the hypoxic microenvironment, laser penetration depth, and potential complexity for combined PDT/PTT. Thus, NIR-responsive oxygen self-supply nanocomposites functionalized with photosensitizers for achieving simultaneous in-depth PDT/PTT are urgently required.