Extracellular Milieu and Membrane Receptor Dual-Driven DNA Nanorobot for Accurate in Vivo Tumor Imaging

Abstract

Precise diagnostic approaches have great potential in cancer intervention and prognosis. Although diverse DNA nanoprobes have been reported for tumor diagnosis, precise tumor imaging in vivo still encounters a great challenge due to the scarcity of exquisite design methodology. Herein, by assembling three programmable modules on a DNA triangular prism, we engineered a DNA nanorobot for simultaneous recognition of extracellular pH and cancer cell membrane receptor in an intelligent manner. Since the design uses two heterogeneous types of biomarkers as inputs, pH-RE not only could discriminate target tumor cells from similar cell mixtures with a recognition accuracy as high as 98.8%, but also could perform precise tumor imaging in living mice by intravenous injection. We expect that this extracellular pH and membrane receptor dual-driven DNA nanorobot will facilitate the establishment of a novel design paradigm for precise cancer diagnosis and therapy.