Phosphatase-like nanozyme activity of carbon nanodots and its potential as supplement for kinase inhibitor drug treating prostate cancer: potential intellectual property discovered in food product

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grant Program 2019-2021

Nanoparticles were discovered to have intrinsic enzyme activities including peroxidase activity. It has been noticed that nanoparticles may enhance phosphatase activity but no reports showed that nanoparticles themselves have intrinsic phosphatase activity. Nano scale carbon dots (C-dots) are recently discovered new materials with an average size below 10 nm with interesting properties such as high photostability, low cost, and impressive biocompatibility. Our submitted manuscripts results showed that the as prepared positive-charged carbon Nanodots by us have phosphatase activity and can bind negatively charged phosphor-group and further enhance efficiency of current clinical kinase inhibitors such as mTOR inhibitor Rapmycin, and prevent drug resistance to Rapmycin. Thus, our central hypothesis is that the combination of kinase inhibitors such as MET inhibitor Crizotinib with positively charged Nano-Quantum Carbon Dots can enhance efficacy of inhibitor such as Crizotinib and suppress castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) cells growth at least by binding to phosphor-groups in kinase phosphorylation/self-phosphorylation. In this proposal we will test this hypothesis by further examining the effects of Carbon Nano-Dots on the phosphorylation of the targeted kinases, and cell growth properties of androgen-insensitive human PCa cell lines and mouse prostate tumors with the following two specific aims: