It is of utmost urgency to achieve effective and safe anticancer treatment with the increasing mortality rate of cancer. Novel anticancer drugs and strategies need to be designed for enhanced therapeutic efficacy. Fenton- and Fenton-like reaction-based chemodynamic therapy (CDT) are new strategies to enhance anticancer efficacy due to their capacity to generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) and oxygen (O2). On the one hand, the generated ROS can damage the cancer cells directly. On the other hand, the generated O2 can relieve the hypoxic condition in the tumor microenvironment (TME) which hinders efficient photodynamic therapy, radiotherapy, etc. Therefore, CDT can be used together with many other therapeutic strategies for synergistically enhanced combination therapy. The antitumor applications of Fenton- and Fenton-like reaction-based nanomaterials will be discussed in this review, including: (iþ) producing abundant ROS in-situ to kill cancer cells directly, (ii) enhancing therapeutic efficiency indirectly by Fenton reaction-mediated combination therapy, (iii) diagnosis and monitoring of cancer therapy. These strategies exhibit the potential of CDT-based nanomaterials for efficient cancer therapy.

Bodipy is one of the most popular dyes for bioimaging, however, complicated synthetic protocol is needed to create and isolate ideal near-infrared (NIR) emissive Bodipy derivatives for optical bioimaging. It...

Sonodynamic therapy (SDT), which uses ultrasound to trigger a sonosensitizer to generate reactive oxygen species (ROS), is a promising form of cancer therapy with outstanding tissue penetration depth. However, the sonosensitizer may inevitably spread to surrounding healthy tissue beyond the tumor, resulting in undesired side effects under an ultrasound stimulus. Herein, as glutathione (GSH) is overexpressed in the tumor microenvironment, a GSH‐activatable sonosensitizer prodrug is designed by attaching a quencher to tetraphydroxy porphyrin for tumor therapy. The prodrug exhibits poor fluorescence and low ROS generation capacity under ultrasound irradiation, but it also showed that it can be activated by GSH to simultaneously switch on fluorescence emission and ROS generation capability at the tumor site. Compared with the non‐quenched sonosensitizer, the designed prodrug exhibits significantly higher tumor/healthy organ fluorescence ratios, due to the specific fluorescence and ROS activation by overexpressed GSH in the tumor. Finally, the prodrug exhibits efficient tumor growth inhibition under ultrasound irradiation, further demonstrating its promise as a GSH‐activated sonosensitizer prodrug for highly effective cancer treatment.

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Correction for ‘Facile synthesis of near-infrared bodipy by donor engineering for in vivo tumor targeted dual-modal imaging’ by Feifei An et al., J. Mater. Chem. B, 2021, 9, 9308–9315, DOI: 10.1039/D1TB01883C.

Various nanocarriers have been explored to deliver drugs for combination therapy. However, most nanocarriers are composed of inert materials without contribution for improving the cancer therapeutic effect. Herein, a hydrophobic photosensitizer is conjugated to poly (ethylene glycol) to form an amphiphilic polymer, which further self-assembles into nanomicelle. The generated nanomicelle can act as a nanocarrier to encapsulate a cytotoxic molecule, IR-775, for combination therapy. The yielded nanodrug is totally composed of pharmacologically active ingredients to avoid any possible toxicity resulted from carrier materials. The nanodrug performs enhanced therapeutic effect compared with any monotherapy and exhibits negligible hemolysis, indicating good biocompatibility for further in vivo applications.