Abstract

Photoactivation has garnered tremendous interest in the last decade, with widespread applications ranging from medicine to energy harvesting and even wastewater treatment. This increasing interest stems from the fact that photoactivation allows the use of light—a noninvasive, spatially, and temporally controllable stimulus to achieve specific outcomes. This is particularly useful for therapeutic applications where specificity and safety are a major concern. With the use of light, therapy can be targeted, reducing side effects and improving efficacy of treatment. In addition, the ability to control parameters such as wavelength, intensity, and duration of exposure, provide an added degree of control. To this end, phototherapies such as photodynamic therapy (PDT), photothermal therapy (PTT), photocontrolled release of drugs/nucleic acids, and combination therapies involving synergistic use of two or more of the previous techniques have come to the fore.