Recent advances of carbon dots in imaging-guided theranostics

Cancer threatens the life and health of human beings, while the effective treatment of cancer is a major challenge. The design of fluorescent probe provides the strategy for developing effective therapeutic nanomaterials that can detect and identify cancer cells as well as achieve targeted and image-guided cancer therapy. Among the fluorescent nanomaterials studied, carbon dots (CDs) have attracted increasing attention owing to their most significant advantages in terms of diverse imaging features, high drug loading as well as low toxicity, and thus they have emerged as one of the most appealing candidates in the field of imaging-guided theranostics. In this review, we firstly overview the imaging analysis of cancer cells, including single-modal imaging and multi-modal imaging. After the introduction of diverse imaging features, we focus on the design of imaging-assisted drug delivery system. Finally, the current development of CDs in imaging-guided photothermal therapy (PTT) and photodynamic therapy (PDT) are further described.