ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the advances in the engineering of silica-based core@shell structured hybrid nanomaterials for biomedical imaging and therapy. The engineering of ultrasmall sized dye-doped silica nanoparticles (NPs) was one of the major challenges during that time. To date, the engineering of biocompatible theranostic NPs with highly specific in vivo tumor active targeting capabilities is still in its very early stages with only a few examples of in vivo tumor actively targeted theranostic NPs being reported. Among the numerous silica-based core@shell structured nanoparticles, ultrasmall fluorescent dye-doped silica hybrid nanoparticles are perhaps one of the most promising types of nanoparticles which have already shown great potential in future tumor-targeted cancer detection and image-guided surgery. Besides using gold nanoshell for photothermal therapeutic application, due to the presence of localized surface plasmon resonance effect, functionalized gold nanosphere can also be used for multimodalit.
