Ligand (biochemistry)

Receptor

Nanotechnology

Organic chemistry

Nanocarriers

Combinatorial chemistry

Mesoporous silica

Reactive oxygen species

Nuclear chemistry

Catalysis

Nanomedicine

Nanoparticle

Chemistry

Materials science

Chelation

Gallate

Drug delivery

Hydrogen peroxide

Biochemistry

Mesoporous material

Nature Communications

The iron gall ink-triggered chemical corrosion of hand-written documents is a big threat to Western cultural heritages, which was demonstrated to result from the iron gall (GA-Fe) chelate-promoted reactive oxygen species generation. Such a phenomenon has inspired us to apply the pro-oxidative mechanism of GA-Fe to anticancer therapy. In this work, we construct a composite cancer nanomedicine by loading gallate into a Fe-engineered mesoporous silica nanocarrier, which can degrade in acidic tumor to release the doped Fe3+ and the loaded gallate, forming GA-Fe nanocomplex in situ. The nanocomplex with a highly reductive ligand field can promote oxygen reduction reactions generating hydrogen peroxide. Moreover, the resultant two-electron oxidation form of GA-Fe is an excellent Fenton-like agent that can catalyze hydrogen peroxide decomposition into hydroxyl radical, finally triggering severe oxidative damage to tumors. Such a therapeutic approach by intratumoral synthesis of GA-Fe nano-metalchelate may be instructive to future anticancer researches.

Intratumoral synthesis of nano-metalchelate for tumor catalytic therapy by ligand field-enhanced coordination