Camouflaged Pdots leverage homologous targeting for NIR-II guided cancer theranostics

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The development of efficient tumor-targeted phototheranostics presents a significant challenge for clinical translation. This work introduces biomimetic cancer cell membrane-coated polymer dots (CCM-Pdots) for second near-infrared window (NIR-II) photoacoustic imaging (PAI)-guided phototherapy. The CCM-Pdots exhibit exceptional photothermal conversion efficiency at 1064 nm. Furthermore, they demonstrate homologous targeting capability, which significantly enhances tumor accumulation compared with bare Pdots, as validated by confocal imaging and photoacoustic tomography. The integrated PAI functionality provides real-time tumor delineation with high contrast. In 4T1 tumor-bearing mice, CCM-Pdots enabled precise photothermal control under 1064 nm irradiation, inducing near-complete tumor ablation while sparing normal tissue. Systemic biosafety of the CCM-Pdots was confirmed through histopathological and hematological analyses, which indicated negligible toxicity. This cell membrane-camouflaged nanoplatform effectively overcomes the biological barriers to targeting and tissue penetration inherent in conventional phototherapy, demonstrating significant potential for clinical image-guided precision tumor therapy. •CCM-Pdots enable dual immune evasion and 1.3-fold enhanced tumor targeting, overcoming the ligand toxicity trade-off. • High NIR-II photothermal efficiency enables deep-tissue PA imaging and precision tumor ablation. •Rigorous biosafety assessment (histopathology, hematology) confirms negligible systemic toxicity at therapeutic doses. • This work establishes a bio-hybrid nanomedicine paradigm, merging cell-mimicry with Pdots for precision tumor theranostics.