Recent advances in luminescent metallacycles/metallacages for biomedical imaging and cancer therapy
Yida Pang, Chonglu Li, Hongping Deng, Yao Sun
Abstract
, and difficulty in monitoring the therapeutic effect in real time, which largely limit their widespread use in clinical applications. The metallacycles/metallacages formed by the coordination-driven self-assembly of highly emitting ligands can solve the above problems. Importantly, acceptors with chemotherapeutic properties in the metallacycles/metallacages can be combined with luminescent ligands to achieve a combination of chemotherapy, imaging contrast agents and multifunctional therapeutic platforms. Here, this review provides an insight into the paradigm of self-assembled metallacycles/metallacages in biological applications, from mono-chemotherapeutic drugs to excellent fluorescent imaging contrast agents and multifunctional therapeutic platforms.