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Review | Open Access

Advances of Upconversion Nanoparticles for Molecular Imaging

Na Zhou, Jian Ni, Rong He( )
Institute of Nano Biomedicine and Engineering, Key Laboratory for Thin Film and Microfabrication Technology of the Ministry of Education, Research Institute of Micro/Nano Science and Technology, Key Laboratory for the Genetics of Developmental & Neuropsychiatric Disorders of Ministry of Education, Bio-X Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dongchuan Road 800, 200240 Shanghai, P. R. China
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Abstract

Molecular imaging is developing fast towards multi-modality and simultaneous therapy. For molecular imaging, upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs), especially lanthanide-doped nanocrystals own obvious advantages such as low toxicity, large Stokes shifts, high resistance to photo-bleaching and photochemical degradation. Moreover, near infrared (NIR) excitation contributes to the auto-fluorescence minimization, a larger penetrating depth, and less harmfulness to cells compared with traditional ultraviolet (UV) excitation. On the other hand, the composites of UCNPs with biological target molecules exert superior performance, broadening their biological application scope from multi-modality imaging, to simultaneous drug delivery and targeted therapy. Herein, we review main advances of UCNPs applied to tumor multi-modality imaging and simultaneous therapy over the past few years, explore their application prospects, and discuss the concepts, issues, approaches, and challenges, with the aim of improving the application of UCNPs in biomedical imaging and therapy in near future.

Keywords

Upconversion nanoparticlesMolecular imagingTargeted therapyLanthanide-doped nanocrystals

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Nano Biomedicine and Engineering
Volume 5 Issue 3,
September 2013
Pages 137-145
DOI: 10.5101/nbe.v5i3.p137-145
Cite this article:
Zhou N, Ni J, He R. Advances of Upconversion Nanoparticles for Molecular Imaging. Nano Biomedicine and Engineering, 2013, 5(3): 137-145. https://doi.org/10.5101/nbe.v5i3.p137-145

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Published: 30 September 2013
© 2013 N. Zhou et al.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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