What is Photopharmacology?

Photopharmacology is a rapidly emerging field in medicine to develop synthetic drugs that can be activated by light. Due to high spatiotemporal precision, the approach can be used for target drug delivery.

In principal, clinicians use the energy of light to locally activate a previously applied prodrug, thus changing its chemical properties, resulting in biological activity. There are different modes of action currently used in photopharmacology, namely photodynamic therapy, photo-uncaging and photoswitching.