Synthetic nanographenes for cancer therapy

Abstract

Noninvasive cancer therapy, such as photodynamic therapy (PDT), photothermal therapy (PTT), and sonodynamic therapy (SDT) is becoming a promising option for cancer therapy. Being the most important factor, photosensitizer/sonosensitizer plays a pivotal role in the PDT, PTT, or SDT. Nanographenes (NGs), the large polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons with nanoscale graphene structures, have received great attention. The significant efforts have been made by bottom-up synthesis strategy to prepare nanographenes with diverse structures and tunable properties. Notably, recent reports have suggested the NGs exhibit great potential as sensitizers for cancer therapy, which open up an avenue for the applications of NGs. In this review, we summarized these results by highlighting the synthesis of NG sensitizers and their efficiency in cancer therapy.