Bioengineering Photoresponsive Therapeutics

Controlled and targeted delivery of therapeutics aids global efforts towards managing further aggravation of escalating incidence and mortality of many leading diseases as well as improving the quality of life for people suffering from chronic diseases. Photoresponsive therapeutics promise a highly programmable and point-of-care therapeutic modality with spatiotemporal control of light. This prospect, however, has yet to be fully harvested largely owing to insufficient in vivo delivery of light and yet-to-be-optimized ADME properties, i.e., absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion, of the light-activated systems. To address these limitations, our research will build on the topic of Bioengineering Photoresponsive Therapeutics, and we aim to survey these challenges from a bioengineering perspective and propose interdisciplinary approaches to enable the light-activated molecules and materials to better meet the needs and criteria for clinical applications.