Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Killing Cancer With Light, Kaitlyn Thomas

Honors Theses

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a relatively new treatment option in medicine including treating some types of cancers. PDT utilizes light to activate small molecules for treatment. Some of these molecules used as PDT agents are porphyrin derivatives. While PDT is currently being used in the fight against cancer, it has several limitations and is currently being used in conjunction with chemotherapy and/or radiation in order to be effective. This research focused on synthesizing a new zinc (II) porphyrin and incorporating a fluorescent sulfocycline and testing the compound on the MB 231 breast cancer cell line.

Once the metallated porphyrin was …

Using Light To Kill Cancer: Development Of A Novel Photodynamic Therapy, Alicia Hamilton Moore

Honors Theses

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a treatment that uses special drugs called photosensitizing agents along with light to kill cancer cells. The specialized drugs only work after they have been activated or "turned on" by light. Photodynamic therapy may also be called photoradiation therapy, phototherapy, or photochemotherapy. In this research, I focused on the addition of four separate hydroxyl-amines to the unsubstituted porphyrin core, H₂TPPC. The hydroxyl-amines attached to the porphyrin core were 5- amino-1-pentanol, 2-amino-2-ethyl-1, 3-propanediol, 3-amino-propanediol, and 5-aminovaleric acid. The novel water soluble PDT agents, H₂TPP-A50H, H₂TPP-2ET, H₂TPP-3NH, and H_{2 …}