A Novel Photosensitizer for Lipid Droplet-Location Photodynamic Therapy

Xiang Xia; Ran Wang; Yingqi Hu; WeiJian Liu; Ting Liu; Wen Sun; Jiangli Fan; Xiaojun Peng

doi:10.3389/fchem.2021.701771

A Novel Photosensitizer for Lipid Droplet-Location Photodynamic Therapy

Front Chem. 2021 Jun 14:9:701771. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2021.701771. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Xiang Xia¹, Ran Wang¹, Yingqi Hu¹, WeiJian Liu¹, Ting Liu¹, Wen Sun^{1

2}, Jiangli Fan^{1

2}, Xiaojun Peng¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.
² Ningbo Institute of Dalian University of Technology, Ningbo, China.

Abstract

Lipid droplets (LDs), an extremely important cellular organelle, are responsible for the storage of neutral lipids in multiple biological processes, which could be a potential target site for photodynamic therapy (PDT) of cancer. Herein, a lipid droplet-targeted photosensitizer (BODSeI) is developed, allowing for fluorescence imaging-guided PDT. Owing to the location of lipid droplets, BODSeI demonstrates enhanced PDT efficiency with an extremely low IC50 value (around 125 nM). Besides, BODSeI shows good biocompatibility and high photostability. Therefore, BODSeI is promising for droplet-location PDT, which may trigger wide interest for exploring the pathway of lipid droplet-location PDT.

Keywords: BODIPY; fluorescence imaging; lipid droplet location; photodynamic therapy; photosensitizer.