Microwave-activated nanodroplet vaporization for highly efficient tumor ablation with real-time monitoring performance

The fast development of nanotechnology has provided a new efficient strategy for enhancing the therapeutic efficiency of various treatment modalities against cancer. However, the improvement of minimally invasive microwave therapy based on nanomaterials has not been realized. In this work, we successfully designed and synthesized a novel folate-targeted nanodroplet (TPN) with a composite mixture of perfluorocarbons as the core and lipid as the shell, which exerts the distinctive dual functions as the adjuvant for highly efficient percutaneous ultrasound imaging-guided microwave ablation (MWA) of tumors. Based on the unique phase-changeable performance of TPN nanosystem, a novel microwave-droplet vaporization (MWDV) strategy was proposed, for the first time, to overcome the critical issues of traditional acoustic-droplet vaporization (ADV) and optical-droplet vaporization (ODV) for cancer theranostics. Especially, the elaborately designed TPN can overcome the challenges of indistinct imaging of ablation margin and the limited ablation zone of MWA modality against cancer. The high efficiency of this new MWDV strategy has been systematically elucidated in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo. Therefore, such a successful demonstration of the role of nanomaterials (TPN in this case) in ultrasound imaging-guided MWA therapy against cancer provides a highly feasible strategy to effectively enhance the MWA outcome with the specific features of high efficiency and biosafety.