Abstract
Porphyrin agents have been studied as photosensitizing anticancer agents and diagnostic probes for many years. The efficiency of their application depends on many factors: intracellular and tissue localization, behaviour in the blood, and specificity for cancer cells.
A deep understanding of these characteristics is helpful to prepare better and more effective porphyrin photosensitizers (PSs) and allows design of tailored photodynamic therapy (PDT) for cancer treatment. Porphyrin structure binding and targeted drug delivery properties dramatically influence the above-mentioned characteristics and consequently enhance PDT efficiency; therefore, they can be used to address major applications.
Unique biological properties of those compounds are described in terms of their PDT and molecular recognition properties. In this chapter, methods which can improve porphyrin anticancer efficiency such as targeted transport and combined therapy are listed and discussed.
Unique biological properties of those compounds are described with a focus on PDT and molecular recognition properties.