The Current Status of Photodynamic Therapy in Cancer Treatment

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Photodynamic therapy (PDT), a non-invasive cancer treatment strategy, has presented a broad scope in future clinical applications. This review mainly summarizes the advances of novel photosensitizers (PSs) characterized with high conversion efficiency and additional refreshing features. Besides, we also demonstrate the development of PDT-based combination therapies with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immune therapy, and gene therapy and their outstanding neoplastic ablation efficiency. ABSTRACT: Although we have made great strides in treating deadly diseases over the years, cancer therapy still remains a daunting challenge. Among numerous anticancer methods, photodynamic therapy (PDT), a non-invasive therapeutic approach, has attracted much attention. PDT exhibits outstanding performance in cancer therapy, but some unavoidable disadvantages, including limited light penetration depth, poor tumor selectivity, as well as oxygen dependence, largely limit its therapeutic efficiency for solid tumors treatment. Thus, numerous strategies have gone into overcoming these obstacles, such as exploring new photosensitizers with higher photodynamic conversion efficiency, alleviating tumor hypoxia to fuel the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), designing tumor-targeted PS, and applying PDT-based combination strategies. In this review, we briefly summarized the PDT related tumor therapeutic approaches, which are mainly characterized by advanced PSs, these PSs have excellent conversion efficiency and additional refreshing features. We also briefly summarize PDT-based combination therapies with excellent therapeutic effects.