The combination of chemotherapy and photothermal therapy shows great potential to achieve synergistic anti-tumor effect. However, it is still a great challenge to design stimuli responsive drug release systems with integrated photothermal/chemotherapy functions. In this paper, novel rod-like carbon nanomaterials (RCNs) were prepared by soft template hydrothermal method with glucose as raw materials, which were proved to have good biocompatibility, excellent drug-loading capacity and high photothermal efficiency. After that, RCNs we used to load doxorubicin (DOX) for integrated photothermal/chemotherapy toward cancer, which demonstrated good treatment efficiency under NIR irradiation. Our approach provided a novel NIR-responsive nano platform for combined photothermal/chemotherapy toward cancer, which was considered to be of great potential in anticancer applications.