Facile synthesis of colloidal stable MoS2 nanoparticles for combined tumor therapy

The bottom-up approach can be used to synthesize MoS2 nanosheets with controlled morphology and synchronous surface modification. However, these MoS2 nanosheets frequently stacked with each other to form a multi-layer structure, which greatly affects the improvement of their drug loading capacity. In this work, we reported a facile bottom-up synthesis of polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) coated biocompatible MoS2 nanoparticles (NPs) with admirable drug loading capacity for synergistic tumor photothermal and chemotherapy. The colloidal-stable MoS2 NPs possessed excellent photothermal transducing performance with the photothermal conversion efficiency of 37.5%. Further, the porous structure of MoS2 NPs facilitated the drug payload with a tunable drug loading percentage of 7%–72%. More importantly, the drug release from the MoS2 NPs followed a controlled pH- and NIR-dual modal responsive manner. The material design takes account of the drug loading capacity of NPs and the photothermal feature of MoS2, providing a paradigm that the research of cancer therapy agents can be moved forward by integrating the advantages of different nanomaterials into one dosage.