Gadolinium Tungstate

Gadolinium tungstate is an important inorganic nanocluster. Its English name is Gadolinium Tungsteate and its chemical formula is Gd2O12W3. It is composed of transition metal tungsten and rare earth element gadolinium connected with oxygen-containing groups. It has unique molecular structure, unique fluorescence properties, excellent water solubility and ultra-small molecular size. It is widely used in biomedicine, analysis, optics and catalysis. At present, the most potential applications are known to be radiotherapy or photothermal therapy for cancer.

High-energy ionizing radiation (X-ray or gamma-ray) is used in radiotherapy. These high-energy radiation may exceed the tolerance of normal cells, resulting in unavoidable damage to normal tissues. In recent years, a lot of research work has been devoted to the development of radiosensitizers based on less toxic side effects.

Gadolinium tungstate can produce radiochemistry (free radicals or ionization) for the treatment of hypoxic tumors by scattering X-rays/photons, Compton electrons, positron-negative pairs and Auger electrons under high-energy radiation. On the one hand, gadolinium tungstate can react with glutathione in cells to reduce the content of glutathione in cells, thus reducing the consumption of glutathione to reactive oxygen species, producing more effective reactive oxygen species, making DNA double-strand damage more serious, and achieving enhanced radiotherapeutic effect. On the other hand, the gadolinium polytungstate nanoclusters synthesized from gadolinium tungstate are very small in size and can be excreted quickly through the kidney, which greatly reduces the toxicity and side effects of long-term accumulation in vivo, and its effect is superior to other traditional radiosensitizers.

Therefore, gadolinium tungstate nanoclusters can not only be used as contrast agent of MRI/CT and sensitizer of hyperthermia/radiotherapy to achieve multi-modality image-guided hyperthermia/radiotherapy, but also can be quickly cleared in vivo to reduce toxicity and side effects, which provides a new idea for the future in-depth exploration of new nano-drugs for cancer diagnosis and treatment.

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