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As a new generation of fluorophores, up-conversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) exhibit high penetration depth in tissues, low photodamage to biological samples, large Stokes shifts, sharp emission bands, free auto-fluorescence background and high photostability, thus making them an ideal kind of fluorescent labels for a variety of assay formats ranging from bio-imaging to cancer therapy. In this article, the method for the synthesis of biocompatible UCNPs, the recent progress regarding the UCNPs for multimodal targeted tumor imaging, drug delivery, photodynamic therapy (PDT), and photothermal therapy (PTT) are discussed on emphasis. The challenges and opportunities in this emerging field are also presented.
This work is supported by the National Key Basic Research Program (973 Project) (No. 2015CB931802), the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 81225010, 81028009 and 31170961), the 863 project of China (Project No. 2014AA020700) and the Shanghai Science and Technology Fund (13NM1401500).
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.