Targeted photodynamic therapy - a promising strategy of tumor treatment

Targeted therapy is a new promising therapeutic strategy, created to overcome growing problems of contemporary medicine, such as drug toxicity and drug resistance. An emerging modality of this approach is targeted photodynamic therapy (TPDT) with the main aim of improving delivery of photosensitizer to cancer tissue and at the same time enhancing specificity and efficiency of PDT. Depending on the mechanism of targeting, we can divide the strategies of TPDT into passive, active and activatable, where in the latter case the photosensitizer is activated only in the target tissue. In this review, contemporary strategies of TPDT are described, including new innovative concepts, such as targeting assisted by peptides and aptamers, multifunctional nanoplatforms with navigation by magnetic field or photodynamic molecular beacons activatable by enzymes and nucleic acid. The imperative of introducing a new paradigm of PDT, focused on the concepts of heterogeneity and dynamic state of tumor, is also called for.