Intracellular uptake and fluorescence imaging potential in tumor cell of zinc phthalocyanine

A near IR absorbing phthalocyanine bearing four binaphtyl group has been synthesized in order to investigate its cytotoxicity and intracellular uptake of sensitizer on MCF-7 (human breast cancer), MDAH (ovarian cancer), HeLa (human epitheloid cervix carcinoma), EMT-6 (mouse breast cancer) and WI-38 (human fibroblast lung) cell lines. ZnPc showed four time higher intracellular uptake in carcinoma cells (MCF-7) than normal (WI-38) cell lines. With the aim of studying in detail the biodistribution feature and tumor nuclear imaging capacity, ZnPc was also labeled with I-131. The efficiency of radiolabeled compound was 95±4.6%. In addition, ZnPc reveals to be very efficient singlet oxygen generators (ΦΔ=0.612 in DMSO) and promising PS for PDT application. In vitro fluorescence imaging study with MCF-7 cells showed that ZnPc localized in cytoplasm of the cells. This results showed that synthesized ZnPc is promising candidate for dual fluorescence/nuclear imaging breast cancer and shows potential PS for PDT application.