Bismuth Sulfide Nanorods as Efficient Photothermal Theragnosis Agents for Cancer Treatment

Bi(2)S(3)nanostructures can theoretically have photothermal properties. However, there are few reports on the application of bismuth sulfide in photothermal therapy due to the poor photothermal effect. To address this problem, herein we obtained Bi(2)S(3)nanorods with defect structures via a facile method. Due to the special shape and defects, the Bi(2)S(3)nanorods exhibited a strong absorption band in the NIR region, thus showed excellent photothermal effect. The photothermal conversion efficiency of Bi(2)S(3)nanorods was calculated to be as high as 78.1% due to the strong NIR absorption. Importantly, the photothermal ablation experiments bothin vitroandin vivoproved that the Bi(2)S(3)nanorods can effectively kill cancer cells under the irradiation of an 808 nm laser. In addition, Bi(2)S(3)nanorods can be used as effective CT imaging agents due to inherently high X-ray attenuation coefficient of bismuth. Our work demonstrated that the Bi(2)S(3)nanorods were very promising photothermal nanoplatforms for photothermal therapy of cancers, guided by CT imaging.