A Simple Binary Supramolecular Co-Assembly Platform for Enhanced Tumor Imaging and Therapy.

The primary challenges in tumor imaging and therapy revolve around improving targeting efficiency, enhancing probe/drug delivery efficacy, and minimizing off-target signals and toxicity. Although various carriers have been developed, many are difficult to synthesize, costly, and not universally applicable. Furthermore, numerous carriers exhibit limited delivery rates in solid tumors, particularly larger nanocarriers.

Amino-Acid-Encoded Supramolecular Nanostructures for Persistent Bioluminescence Imaging of Tumor.

Bioluminescence imaging (BLI) is a powerful technique for noninvasive monitoring of biological processes and cell transplantation. Nonetheless, the application of D-luciferin, which is widely employed as a bioluminescent probe, is restricted in long-term in vivo tracking due to its short half-life. This study presents a novel approach using amino acid-encoded building blocks to accumulate and preserve luciferin within tumor cells, through a supramolecular self-assembly strategy.

Amino-Acid-Encoded Bioinspired Supramolecular Self-Assembly of Multimorphological Nanocarriers.

Supramolecular self-assembly has emerged as an efficient tool to construct well-organized nanostructures for biomedical applications by small organic molecules. However, the physicochemical properties of self-assembled nanoarchitectures are greatly influenced by their morphologies, mechanical properties, and working mechanisms, making it challenging to design and screen ideal building blocks. Herein, using a biocompatible firefly-sourced click reaction between the cyano group of 2-cyano-benzothiazole (CBT) and the 1,2-aminothiol group of cysteine (Cys), an amino-acid-encoded supramolecular self-assembly platform Cys(SEt)-X-CBT (X represents any amino acid) is developed to incorporate both covalent and noncovalent interactions for building diverse morphologies of nanostructures with bioinspired response mechanism, providing a convenient and rapid strategy to construct site-specific nanocarriers for drug delivery, cell imaging, and enzyme encapsulation.