Novel Cyanine dye-based photosensitizers for traceable photodynamic therapy

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) has gained increasing popularity as a clinical therapeutic method, offering advantages like spatiotemporal controllability, non-invasiveness, and non-drug resistance. Tumor microenvironment (TME)-specific activatable long-wavelength (LW) photosensitizers (PSs) are hopeful to overcome the limitations of traditional PDT, such as systemic phototoxicity and shallow tissue penetration. In recent three years, we have developed a series of TME-activatable PSs based on cyanine dyes for fluorescence and photoacoustic dual-modal imaging guided efficient PDT. The development of novel PSs offers possibilities for clinical alternatives.