A ROS-Sensitive Nanozyme-Augmented Photoacoustic Nanoprobe for Early Diagnosis and Therapy of Acute Liver Failure.

Early diagnosis of acute liver failure (ALF) is critical for a curable treatment of the patients, because most existing ALF therapies have narrow therapeutic time windows after disease onset. Reactive oxygen species (ROS), which lead to the sequential occurrences of hepatocyte necrosis and the leakage of alanine aminotransferase (ALT), represent early biomarkers of ALF. Photoacoustic imaging is emerging as a powerful tool for in vivo imaging of ROS. However, high-performance imaging probes that can boost the photoacoustic signals of short-lived ROS of ALF are yet to be developed, and there remains a great challenge for ROS-based imaging of ALF. Herein, we present a ROS-sensitive nanozyme-augmented photoacoustic nanoprobe for successful in vivo imaging of ALF. The deep-penetrated photoacoustic signals of nanoprobe can be activated by the overexpressed ROS in ALF due to the synergy between nanocatalytic bubbles generation and thermoelastic expansion. Impressively, the nanozyme-augmented ROS imaging enables earlier diagnosis of ALF than clinical ALT method, and the ROS-activated catalytic activity of nanoprobe permits timely nanocatalytic therapy of ALF. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.