Multiporphyrinic architectures: Advances in structural design for photodynamic therapy

Abstract

Rationally designed multiporphyrinic architectures for boosting photodynamic therapy (PDT) have attracted significant attentions recently years due to their great potential for light‐mediated generation of reactive oxygen species. However, there is still a gap between the structure design and their PDT performance for biomedical applications. This tutorial review provides a historical overview on (i) the basic concept of PDT for deeply understanding the porphyrin‐mediated PDT reactions, (ii) developing strategies for constructing porphyrinic architectures, like nanorings, boxes, metal‐organic frameworks (MOFs), covalent‐organic frameworks (COFs), vesicles, etc., where we classified into the following three categories: multiporphyrin arrays, porphyrinic frameworks, and others porphyrin assemblies, (iii) the various application scenarios for clinical cancer therapy and antibacterial infection. Also, the existing challenges and future perspectives on the innovation of porphyrinic architectures for clinical PDT applications are mentioned in the end section. Moreover, the porphyrinic nanomaterials with atomically precise architectures provide an ideal platform for investigating the relationship between structures and PDT outputs, design of personalized “all‐in‐one” theranostic agents, and the popularization and application in wider biomedical fields.