Surgical resection and ablation
therapy have been shown to achieve the purpose of a radical cure for
liver cancer with a size of less than 3 cm; however, tiny
liver cancer lesions of diameters smaller than 2 cm remain challenging to diagnose and cure due to the failure of the generation of new blood vessels within
tumors. Emerging evidence has revealed that optical molecular imaging combined with nanoprobes can detect tiny
cancer from the perspective of molecular and cellular levels and kill
cancer cells by the photothermal effect of nanoparticles in real time, thereby achieving radical goals. In the present study, we designed and synthesized multicomponent and multifunctional ICG-
CuS-
Gd@BSA-
EpCAM nanoparticles (NPs) with a potent
antineoplastic effect on tiny
liver cancer. Using subcutaneous and orthotopic
liver cancer xenograft mouse models, we found that the components of the NPs, including ICG and
CuS-
Gd@BSA, showed synergistic photothermal effects on the eradication of tiny
liver cancer. We also found that the ICG-
CuS-
Gd@BSA-
EpCAM NPs exhibited triple-modal functions of fluorescence imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, and photoacoustic imaging, with targeted detection and photothermal treatment of tiny
liver cancer under near-infrared light irradiation. Together, our study demonstrates that the ICG-
CuS-
Gd@BSA-
EpCAM NPs in combination with optical imaging technique might be a potential approach for detecting and noninvasively and radically curing tiny
liver cancer by the photothermal effect.