pH/photothermal dual-responsive drug delivery and synergistic chemo-photothermal therapy by novel porous carbon nanofibers

[Display omitted] •Porous carbon nanofibers (PCNFs) were prepared via electrospun by PAN and PMMA.•Acid and layer-by-layer processes were used to solve the dispersibility of PCNFs.•PCNFs obtained good biocompatibility, hemocompatibility and photothermal ability.•PCNFs showed higher drug loading ability and pH/photothermal dual-responsiveness.•Better tumor inhibition was achieved by synergistic chemo-photothermal therapy. Nanocarbon materials have been well developed due to their excellent properties, whereas the hydrophobicity and surface inertness always limit their further application. In this study, a novel smart nanodrug loading system based on porous carbon nanofibers (PCNFs) were proposed, which obtained excellent properties in dispersibility, suitable near-infrared (NIR) absorbance, photothermal conversion ability and dual-responsive drug delivery. The pores benefited PCNFs to achieve high drug absorption and shortened release rate to prolong the delivery period. In vitro and in vivo results revealed that the combination of chemotherapy and photothermal therapy exerted much higher tumor inhibition efficiency in quite low sample concentration without any side effect on other aspect, which exceeded the simple superposition of individual therapy methods. Therefore, the novel DOX@PCNFs system is anticipated to be applied in the future as effective tumor treatment candidate.