Engineering of a GSH Activatable Photosensitizer for Enhanced Photodynamic Therapy Through Disrupting Redox Homeostasis

Overview

Journal RSC Adv

Publisher Royal Society of Chemistry

Specialty Chemistry

Date 2023 Jul 27

PMID 37497090

Authors

Datian Fu

Yan Wang

Kaiwen Lin

Liangjiu Huang

Jin Xu

Haimei Wu

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Although disrupted redox homeostasis has emerged as a promising approach for tumor therapy, most existing photosensitizers are not able to simultaneously improve the reactive oxygen species level and reduce the glutathione (GSH) level. Therefore, designing photosensitizers that can achieve these two aspects of this goal is still urgent and challenging. In this work, an organic activatable near-infrared (NIR) photosensitizer, CyI-S-diCF, is developed for GSH depletion-assisted enhanced photodynamic therapy. CyI-S-diCF, composed of an iodinated heptamethine cyanine skeleton linked with a recognition unit of 3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)benzenethiol, can specifically react with GSH by nucleophilic substitution, resulting in intracellular GSH depletion and redox imbalance. Moreover, the activated photosensitizer can produce abundant singlet oxygen (O) under NIR light irradiation, further heightening the cellular oxidative stress. By this unique nature, CyI-S-diCF exhibits excellent toxicity to cancer cells, followed by inducing earlier apoptosis. Thus, our study may propose a new strategy to design an activatable photosensitizer for breaking the redox homeostasis in tumor cells.

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