Shine, Shine, Ruthenium Caged Drug†

Abstract

This is a highlight on the paper by Bonnet et al.: A Lock-and-Kill Anticancer Photoactivated Chemotherapy Agent. which constitutes an important step toward establishing photoactivated chemotherapy (PACT) as a widespread tool to treat different health issues, specially tumors. PACT can be a useful technique to deliver already tested drugs, where the effect of the desired molecule is directed only to its target after light irradiation, even in the cases in which it is difficult to achieve a precise delivery in the desired organ or tissue. Ruthenium-polipyridyl caged-compounds are near ideal devices to deliver a drug in that precise fashion, albeit they usually fail in revealing their actual location due to their weak light emission properties. The mentioned work introduces a simple and clever idea: the use of a covalently linked fluorophore to map the caged-compounds in-vivo distribution prior to the eventual irradiation to activate the chemotherapy.