Molybdenum disulfide/graphene oxide nanocomposites show favorable lung targeting and enhanced drug loading/tumor-killing efficacy with improved biocompatibility

Selective targeting plus optimal biocompatibility is still a big challenge in nanomedicine. Although many nanomaterials including graphene oxide (GO) and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) have been tested for this purpose, these materials possess both favorable features and drawbacks, which hampers their further development. Herein, we prepared MoS2/GO nanocomposites that manifested excellent dispersity in aqueous solutions and revealed acceptable biocompatibility in vitro and in vivo. Importantly, MoS2/GO displayed a novel feature to selectively target the lung. In other words, MoS2/GO manifested a pronounced tendency of localization towards the lung comparable to GO, offering a ‘guided missile’ effect in targeting the lung. Furthermore, MoS2/GO composites possessed enhanced drug loading capacity together with reinforced tumor-killing efficacy against cancer cells that have the propensity to metastasize to the lung. Importantly, MoS2/GO composites remarkably repressed metastatic tumor growth of B16 murine melanoma cancer cells in lungs of mice. Mechanistically, MoS2/GO was demonstrated to reveal compromised reactions towards macrophages at the nano-bio interface relative to GO, which is accountable for the interaction and the uptake of nanosheets by macrophages associated with phagocytosis and macrophagic activation. Considered together, our findings established new MoS2/GO nanocomposites with multi-functionalities including selective lung targeting, favorable drug loading capacity, elevated tumor killing efficacy and improved biocompatibility. Our study opens an avenue for MoS2/GO nanocomposites in cancer nanotheranostics.