Publications by authors named "Eleni Nestoros"
Photodynamic therapy (PDT) - which combines light, oxygen and photosensitizers (PS) to generate reactive oxygen species - has emerged as an effective approach for targeted ablation of pathogenic cells with reduced risk of inducing resistance. Some organic PS are now being applied for PDT in the clinic or undergoing evaluation in clinical trials. A limitation of the first-generation organic PS was their potential off-target toxicity.
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- Controlling chemical processes with precision is crucial for areas like biomedical research and drug manufacturing, yet there's a need for universal methods to adjust reactivity in organic photosensitizers.
- This study highlights a new strategy that allows for the fine-tuning of singlet oxygen production using bioresponsive stimuli, demonstrating that photocatalytic activity can be blocked and then activated with various triggers.
- The approach is applicable to a wide range of photosensitizers and can be utilized in practical applications, such as targeted destruction of human cells and enhancing the release of singlet oxygen in the synthesis of natural product drugs.
Photodynamic therapy is an anti-cancer treatment that requires illumination of photosensitizers to induce local cell death. Current near-infrared organic photosensitizers are built from large and non-modular structures that cannot be tuned to improve safety and minimize off-target toxicity. This work describes a novel chemical platform to generate enzyme-activatable near-infrared photosensitizers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlike typical polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, such as coronene, which are flat and planar, corannulene is a molecular bowl of carbon. It can be imagined as the cap region of fullerene C60 or an end of a single-walled carbon nanotube. This structural distinction manifests itself in unique properties.
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