An Activatable X-Ray Scintillating Luminescent Nanoprobe For Early Diagnosis And Progression Monitoring Of Thrombosis In Live Rat

Thrombosis is a frequent predisposing factor in high-mortality cardiovascular diseases, which underscores the urgent need to precisely diagnose thrombosis formation at a less severe stage. However, it is still challenging to realize in vivo early thrombosis imaging due to lack of high sensitivity/-specificity molecular imaging strategy. To address such problems, thrombin-activatable scintillating nanoprobes are developed for background-free X-ray-excited luminescence (XEL) imaging of in vivo early thrombosis. The nanoprobes are constructed by designing bright XEL-emitting lanthanide-doped scintillator nanocrystals (NCs) with dye labeled-peptide modification. Such nanoprobes show XEL-off originally and enable robust turn-on XEL upon thrombin-specific cleavage of the peptide, resulting from the rational manipulation of energy transfer between dye and NCs. Specially, due to high tissue penetration depth and background-free attributes in XEL imaging, this strategy achieves high-efficiency XEL imaging of the early thrombosis on the basis of in situ elevated thrombin levels. Moreover, XEL and magnetic resonance imaging capabilities can be integrated to further improve imaging accuracy and monitor thrombosis progression. As such, the exploited strategy demonstrates a novel paradigm for realizing timely thrombosis imaging and provides a new readily tailorable platform for sensitive in vivo deep-tissue imaging.