Construction of methylene blue embedded core–shell-satellite structured Au@Ag nanorods@SiO2@Au nanocomposites for synergistic therapy of cancer

Integration of multimodal therapies into one nanoplatform holds great promise to overcome the drawbacks of conventional single-modal therapy. Herein, we designed and constructed an ultrafine gold nanoparticle (Au NPs) decorated and methylene blue (MB) embedded core–shell-satellites structured Au@Ag nanorods@SiO2 nanocomposites (CSSNs) using a wet-chemical method. It can be found that excellent photothermal conversion performance and outstanding reactive oxygen species (ROS) production capacity were integrated on this one nonocomposites. In vitro experiments, all cancer cells were killed in nanocomposites with two laser irradiation group, which is better than that of nanocomposites without laser irradiation (12 % cancer cells were killed) and nanocomposites with one laser irradiation (660 nm laser, 84 % cancer cells were killed or 808 nm laser, 95 % cancer cells were killed). It is obviously that the synergistic effect was achieved between chemodynamic therapy (CDT), photodynamic therapy (PDT) and photothermal therapy (PTT). The vivo results further confirmed that the as-prepared nanocomposites can suppress the tumor growth without obvious systemic toxicity. This work will pave a new avenue for the construction of multifunctional nanocomposites and their multimodal therapy application for cancers.