Sonodynamic therapy (SDT), a new noninvasive therapy for antineoplastic and antibacterial treatment, uses ultrasound to activate sonosensitizers concentrated at the affected parts, which generates reactive oxygen species (ROS) to damage the lipid, protein and DNA of tumor cells or bacteria. Designing sonosensitizers with excellent sonodynamic performance is key to the study of SDT. However, such imperfections of traditional sonosensitizers as phototoxicity, low ROS generation rate and obscure mechanism, have limited their clinical applications. Herein, Prof. Zhang Xianzeng’s research group put forward and constructed BaTiO3 (BT)-based piezoelectric sonosensitizers with multiphase coexistence within the human body temperature range to boost higher piezoelectricity, piezo-potential and ROS generation rate, attributable to decreased polarization anisotropy by flat Gibbs energy profile. Elevated piezo-potential in designed BT-based piezocatalysts guarantees high-efficient generation rate of •OH (200 µmol g−1 h−1) and •O2− (40 µmol g−1 h−1) by ultrasound stimulation with superior antibacterial performance. Meanwhile, First-principals calculations validate that the local distortion of TiO6 octahedra also contributes to piezocatalytic performance by inducing electron-hole pairs separation in real space, and better response to external ultrasonic stimulation. The work is important for designing high-performance piezoelectric sonosensitizers for SDT.
The research, entitled “High-Efficiency Reactive Oxygen Species Generation by Multiphase and TiO6 Distortion-Mediated Superior Piezocatalysis in Perovskite Ferroelectrics”, was published in the top international journal Advanced Functional Materials. FNU is the first organization of the paper, with Huang Yanli, a postdoctoral student of College of Photonic and Electronic Engineering of FNU, as the first author, and Prof. Zhang Xianzeng of FNU and Prof. Wu Jiagang of Sichuan University as the co-corresponding authors; Prof. Wu Tianmin is responsible for relevant theoretical calculations of the project. The work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China and Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province.
Paper link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202210726
(Translated by Bai Yunfei/Reviewed by Xie Xiujuan)