Inherent multifunctional inorganic nanomaterials for imaging-guided cancer therapy

Abstract Nanomaterials offer tremendous potential for cancer imaging and therapy due to their unique intrinsic characteristics. Combining imaging and therapeutic agents in one nanoplatform can bring great benefits for simultaneous diagnosis and therapy. However, incorporating different functional moieties together to form multifunctional nanoplatform increase the steps of synthesis and difficulties of purification, which is hard for reproducibility, scale-up and further toxicity study. Thus, engineering nanomaterials with components that possesses multiple intrinsic functionalities as both imaging and therapy agents, which mostly are derived from inorganic materials, would simplify the composition of nanomaterials to get uniform nanostructures. In this review, we will focus on the recent reports on the multifunctional inorganic nanoplatforms built from the components possessing multiple intrinsic functionalities, which can be applied in imaging-guided therapy, including magnetic hyperthermia, photothermal therapy, photodynamic therapy, chemodynamic therapy, surgery and synergistic therapy.