"We've engineered a single material that does two jobs in sequence," Dr. Bingyang Shi, Chair Professor of nanomedicine at UTS, said. "It's a precise guide for the surgeon during the operation, and then a targeted clean-up treatment afterward."

A fluorescent dye on the sheet glows under near-infrared light at a wavelength invisible to the human eye. A targeting molecule helps the nanoparticle cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate inside glioma cells.

What happens after the visible tumor is removed?

Once surgeons finish the operation, the same material is reintroduced into the surgical cavity. The same near-infrared wavelength now triggers a therapeutic mode.

The mechanism runs two actions at once:

• Platinum atoms on the sheet convert hydrogen peroxide — a molecule the tumor produces — into oxygen, breaking down the low-oxygen shield that normally protects cancer cells.
• Light-activated heat and reactive molecules generated by the same beam kill microscopic cancer cells that the surgeon could not reach.

How well did it perform in mice?

In mouse models of glioblastoma, the post-surgical treatment sharply reduced recurrence. All treated mice survived to 60 days. Mice that received surgery alone had a median survival of 42 days.

Follow-up behavioral tests found no detectable neurological or motor problems tied to the treatment.

How far is this from the clinic?

Far. The experiments ran entirely in mouse models. Human glioblastoma tumors behave differently from those grown in lab animals.

"The results are very encouraging, but this is still early-stage research carried out in mouse models, not in people — and that distinction is important," Shi said. "Its imaging and therapeutic performance will also need to be confirmed at the scale of a human brain."

If the approach holds up through further testing, the researchers hope surgeons could one day see more of the tumor during operations and treat more of what remains. Reducing recurrence remains one of glioblastoma's largest unsolved problems.

The paper, "Spatiotemporal-switchable 2D NIR-II single-atom nanozyme for single-cell–level surgical navigation and glioblastoma phototherapy," appears in Science Translational Medicine, Volume 18, Issue 861 (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aeb8054).