Epigenetics-inspired photosensitizer modification for plasma membrane-targeted photodynamic tumor therapy

In recent years, epigenetics has attracted great attentions in the field of biomedicine, which is used to denote the heritable changes in gene expression without any variation in DNA sequence, including DNA methylation, histone modification and so on. Inspired by it, a simple and versatile amino acids modification strategy is proposed in this paper to regulate the subcellular distribution of photosensitizer for plasma membrane targeted photodynamic therapy (PDT). Particularly, the plasma membrane anchoring ability and photo toxicity of the photosensitizer against different cell lines could be effectively manipulated at a single amino acid level. Systematic researches indicate that the number and variety of amino acids have a significant influence on the plasma membrane targeting effect of the photosensitizer. Furthermore, after self-assembling into nanoparticles, the obtained nano photosensitizers (NPs) also exhibit a good biocompatibility and plasma membrane targeting ability, which are conducive to enhancing the PDT therapeutic effect under light irradiation. Both in vitro and in vivo investigations confirm a robust tumor inhibition effect of NPs with a good biocompatibility. This epigenetics-inspired photosensitizer modification strategy would contribute to the development of structure-based drug design for tumor precision therapy.