Learning from the antimalarial mechanism of artemisinin in nature, we explored the methemoglobin as a smart nanocarrier of artemisinin. While the methemoglobin reacts very slow with artemisinin, the upregulated reducing capacity of tumor tissue can work as an excellent biogenic trigger to reduce ferric iron in methemoglobin to ferrous state, hence turn on the free radical generation ability and cytotoxicity of artemisinin in situ. The bioinspired nanocarrier may pave a new way to achieve targeted toxicity to cancer cells with extremely low side effects.
- Huan Li
- Yangjun Chen
- Jian Ji
