Photodynamic therapy for localized infections – state of the art

By Tianhong Dai, Ying-ying Huang, Michael R Hamblin. Photodiagnosis and Photodynamic Therapy, 2009

746 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) was discovered over one hundred years ago by observing the killing of microorganisms when harmless dyes and visible light were combined in vitro. Since then it has primarily been developed as a treatment for cancer, ophthalmologic disorders and in dermatology. However in recent years interest in the antimicrobial effects of PDT has revived and it has been proposed as a therapy for a large variety of localized infections. This revival of interest has largely been driven by the inexorable increase in drug resistance amongst many classes of pathogen. Advantages of PDT include equal killing effectiveness regardless of antibiotic resistance, and a lack of induction of PDT resistance. Disadvantages include the cessation of the antimicrobial effect when the light is turned off, and less than perfect selectivity for microbial cells over host tissue. This review will cover the use of PDT to kill or inactivate pathogens in ex vivo tissues and in biological materials such as blood. PDT has been successfully used to kill pathogens and even to save life in several animal models of localized infections such as surface wounds, burns, oral sites, abscesses and the middle ear. A large number of clinical studies of PDT for viral papillomatosis lesions and for acne refer to its anti-microbial effect, but it is unclear how important this microbial killing is to the overall therapeutic outcome. PDT for periodontitis is a rapidly growing clinical application and other dental applications are under investigation. PDT is being clinically studied for other dermatological infections such as leishmaniasis and mycobacteria. Antimicrobial PDT will become more important in the future as antibiotic resistance is only expected to continue to increase.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c8a711878e23ed8ddf07f7d22d0cf59736a655f

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Citations in the corpus

• Antimicrobial strategies centered around reactive oxygen species--bactericidal antibiotics, photodynamic therapy, and beyond. (2013, background): “In the presence of molecular ground (triplet)-state oxygen (3O2), the excited-state PS transfer energy or electrons to producing ROS that are able to kill cells (Dai et al., 2009a, b).”
• Antimicrobial photodynamic inactivation: a bright new technique to kill resistant microbes (2016, unknown): “Moreover the binding of the PS to the microbial cells is relatively rapid, while uptake of the cationic PS by mammalian cells is slow, thus giving good selectivity when a short druglight interval (few minutes) is employed [6].”