Light-triggered unconventional therapies with engineered inorganic nanoparticles

The utilization of nanomaterials to release therapeutic agents under the control of light stimuli to enhance the therapeutic efficacy is one of the major challenges in nanomedicine. Because of their wide variety, good biocompatibility and facile functionalization, many inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) offer great potential in this respect. Their engineering with suitable photoactivatable components can open up exciting avenues in the field of the most intriguing unconventional therapeutic approaches for fighting cancer and bacterial diseases, such as photodynamic therapy (PDT), nitric oxide (NO) photodynamic therapy (NO-PDT) and photothermal therapy (PTT). These emerging treatment modalities are based on the localized cytotoxic action induced by a “burst” of singlet oxygen, nitric oxide or heat, generated with superb spatiotemporal control by appropriate photoprecursors, and in principle, they can be alternatives to, or used in combination with, conventional chemotherapeutic and antibiotic drugs. This account illustrates an overview of the work carried out in our research group over the last years and specifically focuses on inorganic NPs based on non-metallic- and noble metal scaffolds, highlighting the logical design and their potential applications in PDT, NO-PDT and PTT.