Application of graphene oxide in tumor targeting and tumor therapy

Abstract

Graphene oxide (GO), as a kind of two-dimensional sp2 carbon nanomaterials, has attracted great attention in many fields in the past decade. Due to its unique physical and chemical properties, GO is showing great promise in the field of biomedicine. For GO, all the atoms on its surface are exposed to the surface with ultra-high specific surface area, and a variety of groups on the surface, such as carboxyl, hydroxyl and epoxy groups, can effectively bind/load various biomolecules. Due to the availability of these groups, GO also possesses excellent hydrophilicity and biocompatibility for the modification of the desired biocompatible molecules or polymers on the surface of GO. The nano-network structure and hydrophobicity of GO enable it to load a large number of hydrophobic drugs containing benzene rings and it has been widely used as a multi-functional nano-carrier for chemotherapeutic drug or gene delivery. This review article will give an in-depth overview of the synthesis methods of GO, the advantages and disadvantages of GO used in nano-drug delivery system, the research progress of GO as a stimulus-responsive nano-drug carrier, and the application of these intelligent systems in cancer treatment.

Keywords:

• Targeting ligands
• graphene-based nanosheets
• cancer treatment
• surface modification
• drug delivery

Authors’ contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Jian Li, Jia Zhang, Yibo Yang and Kun Li. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Jia Zhang and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Consent to publish

The authors affirm that human research participants provided informed consent for publication of the images.

Ethics approval

This is an observational study. The Yanshan University Research Ethics Committee has confirmed that no ethical approval is required.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 62071413], the Hebei Natural Science Foundation [grant numbers C2019203556, F2020203056], the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province for Innovation Group Project [grant number C2022203003].