Biomimetic CuCoO2 nanosheets reinforced with self-assembling peptide nanofibers for tumor photothermal therapy

Abstract

The flexible design and unique physical and chemical properties of self-assembled peptides have shown great potential for applications in the fields of materials science, life science, and environmental science. Peptide nanofibers (PNFs), as a kind of bioactive nanomaterials, possess excellent biocompatibility, flexible designability, and multifaceted functionalizability. In this work, we design and describe PNFs that self-assembled by peptide molecules as carriers for bimetallic nanosheets (BMNS), leading to the development of hybrid nanomaterials, BMNS–PNFs, with unique properties. The BMNS–PNFs exhibit a photothermal conversion efficiency (PCE) of up to 31.57%, and can be used as a potential nanoplatform for photothermal therapy (PTT) of lung tumour cells. Through the results, it is shown that the PNFs can reduce the cytotoxicity of BMNS–PNFs and that BMNS–PNFs have excellent cancer cell killing effects, with photothermal killing rates of more than 95% and 90% for lung cancer cells HCC2279 and PC9, respectively. Finally, the comprehensive PTT performance of BMNS–PNFs is analysed by Ranking of Efficiency Performance (REP), and the REP value of BMNS–PNFs is calculated to be 0.741. The peptide sequences used to assemble into PNFs in this study are instructive for functional design and structural modulation of molecular self-assembly, and the constructed bimetallic–biomolecular hybrid materials provide a potential strategy for medical bioengineering.