Carbon Nanomaterials for Bioimaging, Bioanalysis, and Therapy

3 Carbon Nanomaterials for Optical Bioimaging and Phototherapy

Haifeng Dong and Yu Cao

Beijing Key Laboratory for Bioengineering and Sensing Technology, Research Center for Bioengineering and Sensing Technology, School of Chemistry & Biological Engineering, University of Science & Technology, Beijing, PR China

3.1 Introduction

Cancer is one of the most deadly diseases facing humanity [1]. The current standard cancer management includes stage determination, chemo/radiation therapy, and surgical resection. Despite great process has been made in the past few decades, early diagnosis and efficient treatment of cancer are still challenging to overcome [2]. Molecular imaging is a useful tool to monitor in vivo biochemical events and the development of nanomaterials as biomedical imaging agents is a very promising method to obtain detailed images in living systems [3, 4]. It is beneficial for the researchers to follow the distribution of the drug inside the organism and gives further hints for the optimization of disease treatment to combine the drug delivery features with imaging techniques [5, 6]. The combination of diagnostic tools such as optical imaging with therapeutical approaches such as chemotherapy and phototherapy gives rise to promising theranostic nanomaterials [7–9]. As the forefront of theranostic nanomaterials for cancer therapy, the unique optical properties of carbon nanomaterials such as fullerenes [10], nanodiamonds (NDs) [11, 12], carbon nanotube