手性，定义为“镜像”，是生物和非生物物质的普遍几何形状。这些分子的几何形状决定了它们在组装和传输过程中的相互作用。随着纳米技术的发展，许多具有手性几何形状或手性光学活性的纳米颗粒出现在生物医学研究中。关于手性起源的机制和相应的合成方法在过去十年中已经得到了讨论和发展。受到生命中手性选择性的启发，对手性纳米材料与生物系统之间相互作用的全面深入研究在生物医学领域具有深远意义。在这里，我们研究了纳米尺度药物载体石墨烯量子点（GQDs）的手性对其在类肿瘤细胞球体中的转运的影响。通过将GQDs表面修饰成L/D-半胱氨酸，实现了L/D-GQDs的手性。作为药物测试的体外组织模型，通过悬滴法使用人类肝癌细胞系（即HepG2细胞）培养细胞球体。我们的结果显示，L-GQDs的表观扩散系数比D-GQDs高出1.7倍，表明L-GQDs可以增强其进入类肿瘤细胞球体的转运。此外，当通过π-π堆积法装载常见化疗药物多柔比星（DOX）时，L-GQDs作为纳米载体对药物输送到类实体肿瘤组织中更有效，导致对癌细胞球体的疗效比自由DOX高出25%。总体而言，我们的研究表明，纳米载体的手性对于设计药物输送载体以增强药物在癌肿瘤中的转运是至关重要的。Copyright © 2023 Jeon, Zhu, Kim and Wang.

Chirality, defined as "a mirror image," is a universal geometry of biological and nonbiological forms of matter. This geometry of molecules determines how they interact during their assembly and transport. With the development of nanotechnology, many nanoparticles with chiral geometry or chiroptical activity have emerged for biomedical research. The mechanisms by which chirality originates and the corresponding synthesis methods have been discussed and developed in the past decade. Inspired by the chiral selectivity in life, a comprehensive and in-depth study of interactions between chiral nanomaterials and biological systems has far-reaching significance in biomedicine. Here, we investigated the effect of the chirality of nanoscale drug carriers, graphene quantum dots (GQDs), on their transport in tumor-like cellular spheroids. Chirality of GQDs (L/D-GQDs) was achieved by the surface modification of GQDs with L/D-cysteines. As an in-vitro tissue model for drug testing, cellular spheroids were derived from a human hepatoma cell line (i.e., HepG2 cells) using the Hanging-drop method. Our results reveal that the L-GQDs had a 1.7-fold higher apparent diffusion coefficient than the D-GQDs, indicating that the L-GQDs can enhance their transport into tumor-like cellular spheroids. Moreover, when loaded with a common chemotherapy drug, Doxorubicin (DOX), via π-π stacking, L-GQDs are more effective as nanocarriers for drug delivery into solid tumor-like tissue, resulting in 25% higher efficacy for cancerous cellular spheroids than free DOX. Overall, our studies indicated that the chirality of nanocarriers is essential for the design of drug delivery vehicles to enhance the transport of drugs in a cancerous tumor.Copyright © 2023 Jeon, Zhu, Kim and Wang.