Porphyrin-Based Nanomaterials for Cancer Nanotheranostics

Porphyrins have been explored as emerging theranostic agents in the therapeutic intervention of cancer. It has been potentially implicated in the treatment of cancer radiotherapy, photodynamic therapy, chemical sonosensitizer, fluorescence magnetic resonance, and other biomedical imaging. Due to the hydrophobic property of porphyrin, it forms insoluble aggregate in aqueous medium and is not easy to work. However, several work has been taken place and isolated new porphyrin but due to the lack of tissue selectivity, high aggregation in skin only few of them has real clinical efficacy. Despite this, encapsulating porphyrin in nanoparticles through rational design make it promising because of transformation into suitable forms such as lipophilic, immune tolerance, prolonged tissue lifetime, and improved delivery features. Additionally the various surface modifying components (viz., ligands, targeting moiety/protein/peptides, and imaging agent) could be introduced into nanoparticulate platforms for cancer theranostics. This chapter briefly acquainted the insight into current porphyrin-based nanoparticles delivery in multimodal imaging and diagnosis of tumor and simultaneous therapeutic utility in pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences.