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Combination therapy, especially photodynamic/photothermal therapy (PDT/PTT), has shown promising applications in cancer therapy. However, sequential irradiation by two different laser sources and even the utilization of single high-power laser to induce either combined PDT/PTT or individual PTT will be subjected to prolonged treatment time, complicated treatment process, and potential skin burns. Thus, low power single laser activatable combined PDT/PTT is still a formidable challenge. Herein, we propose an effective strategy to achieve synergistic cancer phototherapy under low power single laser irradiation for short duration. By taking advantage of dual plasmonic PTT nanoagents (AuNRs/MoS2), a significant increase in temperature up to 60 °C with an overall photothermal conversion efficiency (PCE) of 68.8% was achieved within 5 min under very low power (0.2 W/cm2) NIR laser irradiation. The enhanced PCE and PTT performance is attributed to the synergistic plasmonic PTT effect (PPTT) of dual plasmonic nanoagents, promoting simultaneous release (85%) of electrostatically bonded indocyanine green (ICG) to induce PDT effects, offering simultaneous PDT/synergistic PPTT. Both in vitroand in vivoinvestigations reveal complete cell/tumor eradication, implying that simultaneous PDT/synergistic PPTT effects induced by AuNRs/MoS2–ICG are much superior over individual PDT or synergistic PPTT. Notably, synergistic PPTT induced by dual plasmonic nanoagents also demonstrates higher in vivoantitumor efficacy than either individual PDT or PTT agents. Taken together, under single laser activation with low power density, the proposed strategy of simultaneous PDT/synergistic PPTT effectively reduces the treatment time, achieves high therapeutic index, and offers safe treatment option, which may serve as a platform to develop safer and clinically translatable approaches for accelerating cancer therapeutics.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disease of joints with no permanent cure. Although, there are some treatment strategies for RA that can go into remission but a precise treatment strategy is not currently available due to different patient manifestations. In addition, the use of various naturally available anti-inflammatory agents and antioxidants are hampered due to their instability in blood and lack of effective penetration into the synovial fluid. In this study, we aimed to enhance the therapeutic potential of natural but less bioavailable flavonoids by using lipid-based nanocarriers. Three types of lipid nanocarriers including stearic acid (SA), stearic-lauric (SL), and lecithin-chitosan (LC) nanocarriers (with encapsulated naringenin) were prepared by hot melt encapsulation and coprecipitation techniques, respectively. Arthritis in rats was induced by a single injection of complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA) in the sub-planter region of the left hind paw. Thirty six (36) male albino rats were divided into six groups with six animals each. Sole naringenin (NAR) and NAR-loaded lipid NPs (40 mg/kg) were administered orally to treatment groups after 1 h of CFA injection for 28 days continuously. NAR-loaded nanocarriers of spherical shape were synthesized with an average size less than ∼190 nm and zeta potential (<-25 mV for SA and SL, and >+30 mV for LC). We observed the encapsulation efficiency (EE) of 85%, 78% and 81% for LC, SA and SL, respectively. In vitrorelease of NAR from all nanoformulations showed sustained release behaviour. NAR loaded all lipid nanoformulations significantly (p < 0.001) reduced RA factor, key inflammatory markers, and joint damage than sole NAR. Among all nanocarriers, superior efficacy of SL may be due to synergistic anti-inflammatory effects of the lauric acid. Moreover, HE staining study demonstrated that NAR-loaded NPs significantly suppressed pathological changes of joints and liver tissues. In conclusion, solid lipid nanocarriers and lipid polymer hybrid nanoparticles are proposed here as a safe and effective oral delivery systems to enhance the therapeutic potential of NAR for rheumatoid arthritis treatment. SL carriers were found most effective, followed by LC nanocarriers and SA nanocarriers.

Nanotheranostics is an emerging frontier of personalized medicine research particularly for cancer, which is the second leading cause of death. Supramolecular aspects in theranostics are quite allured to achieve more regulation and controlled features. Supramolecular nanotheranostics architecture is focused on engineering of modular supramolecular assemblies benefitting from their mutable and stimuli-responsive properties which confer an ultimate potential for the fabrication of unified innovative nanomedicines with controlled features. Amalgamation of supramolecular approaches to nano-based features further equip the potential of designing novel approaches to overcome limitations seen by the conventional theranostic strategies, for curing even the lethal diseases and endowing personalized therapeutics with optimistic prognosis, endorsing their clinical translation. Among many potential nanocarriers for theranostics, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have shown various promising advances in theranostics and their formulation can be tailored for several applications. Despite the great advancement in cancer nanotheranostics, there are still many challenges that need to be highlighted to fill the literature gap. For this purpose, herein, we have presented a systematic overview on the subject and proposed LNPs as the potential material to manage cancer via non-invasive approaches by highlighting the use of supramolecular approaches to make them robust for cancer theranostics. We have concluded the review by entailing the future perspectives of lipid nanotheranostics towards clinical translation.