The existence of cancer stem cells (CSCs) poses a major obstacle for the success of current
cancer therapies, especially the fact that non-CSCs can spontaneously turn into CSCs, which lead to the failure of the treatment and
tumor relapse. Therefore, it is very important to develop effective strategies for the eradication of the CSCs. In this work, we have developed a CSCs-specific targeted,
retinoic acid (RA)-loaded
gold nanostars-dendritic
polyglycerol (GNSs-dPG) nanoplatform for the efficient eradication of CSCs. The nanocomposites possess good biocompatibility and exhibit effective CSCs-specific multivalent targeted capability due to
hyaluronic acid (HA) decorated on the multiple attachment sites of the bioinert dendritic
polyglycerol (dPG). With the help of CSCs differentiation induced by RA, the self-renewal of breast CSCs and
tumor growth were suppressed by the high therapeutic efficacy of
photothermal therapy (PTT) in a synergistic inhibitory manner. Moreover, the stemness gene expression and CSC-driven tumorsphere formation were significantly diminished. In addition, the in vivo
tumor growth and CSCs were also effectively eliminated, which indicated superior anticancer activity, effective CSCs suppression, and prevention of relapse. Taken together, we developed a CSCs-specific targeted, RA-loaded GNSs-dPG nanoplatform for the targeted eradication of CSCs and for preventing the relapse.