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Surgical resection, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy are traditional methods for cancer treatment. With the development of materials science, photodynamic, photothermal, and sonodynamic therapies have been established over the past few years. Despite these advances, the development of novel and efficient cancer treatment protocols remains highly desirable. Recently, combination therapy has emerged as a powerful tool for achieving this goal. In this context, cyanine-nanoparticles have attracted considerable interest. Cyanine dyes have high molar absorptivity, narrow absorption/emission bands, and also excellent biocompatibility. This has meant that they have been widely used in biomedical imaging and therapy. Cyanine nanoparticles assembled from cyanine dyes and amphiphilic polymers or liposomes are endowed with high biocompatibility and long-term circulation for cancer combination therapy. A plethora of cyanine–nanoparticle-based combination therapy systems have been reported, and research in this discipline continues to expand. In this review, we aim to summarize recent advances in the combination therapy of cancers using cyanine nanoparticles over the last five years (i.e., from 2018 to 2023), with an emphasis on the structures of cyanine dyes, design concepts, and combination strategies. Personal insights and challenges in this field are also discussed. We expect that this review will inspire creative progress in combination therapies based on cyanine nanoparticles and facilitate the investigation of future clinical applications.

Over the past decade, aggregation-induced emission (AIE) molecules have played a pivotal role in bioimaging, anti-microbial, and photodynamic therapy, and have been at the forefront of several disciplines worldwide. When combined with chiral moieties, they can easily collide with dazzling sparks and exhibit exceptional and unique advantages. In the application of chiral recognition and measurement of enantiomeric excess, it can identify chiral molecules visually based on color change and precipitation reaction, quantitatively analyze chiral molecules while determining the enantiomeric composition based on the fluorescence intensity change at different wavelengths, and obtain two parameters about chiral molecules from one measurement, thereby demonstrating its high selectivity, sensitivity and accuracy in chiral identification. In the field of organic circularly polarized luminescent (CPL) materials, the asymmetry (glum) of common organic light emitting elements is usually between 10−5 and 10−2, whereas the CPL asymmetry factor (glum) of chiral AIE fluorogens (AIEgens) can reach 1.42, which is very close to the theoretical value of 2. Therefore, the combination of chiral elements and luminescent groups promotes their adoption in the field of organic CPL materials. Herein we have summarized the recent applications of chiral AIEgens in both chiral molecule recognition and circularly polarized organic light-emitting diode (CP-OLED) in order to provide future researchers with a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of chiral AIEgens and to encourage more scientists to contribute to the development of AIEgens.

Diazo compounds have proven to be a useful class of carbenes or metal carbenoids sources under thermal, photochemical, or metal-catalyzed conditions, which can subsequently undergo a wide range of synthetically important transformations. Recently, asymmetric photocatalysis has provoked increasing research interests, and great advances have been made in this discipline towards the synthesis of optically enriched compounds. In this context, the past two decades have been the most productive period in the developments of enantioselective photochemical reactions of diazo compounds due to a better understanding of the reactivities of diazo compounds and the emergence of new catalytic modes, as well as easier access to and treatment of stabilized diazo compounds. This review highlights these impressive achievements according to the reaction type, and the general mechanisms and stereochemical inductions are briefly discussed as well.

The formyloxylation reaction of 3-bromooxindoles with water and N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF) has been developed in the presence of the photoredox catalyst fac-Ir(ppy)3 under irradiation of visible light at ambient temperature. The reaction provides a straightforward approach to pharmaceutically and synthetically useful 3-formyloxyoxindoles in high yields. The mechanism of this transformation was investigated by fluorescence quenching experiments, "on-off" switching of the light source, labeling experiments, mass spectral analyses and in situ IR experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An efficient halocyclization of β,γ-unsaturated hydrazones with N-bromosuccinimide was developed without the addition of any additives under mild reaction conditions to provide facile access to biologically important 4,5-dihydropyrazoles. Under the optimized conditions, a variety of highly substituted 4,5-dihydropyrazole derivatives were obtained in generally good yields. Moreover, this reaction can be further applied to the synthesis of pyrazoles in a one-pot fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An enantioselective tandem Friedel-Crafts alkylation/ Michael addition reaction of 1-methylindoles with nitroolefin enoates catalyzed by a chiral tridentate bisoxazoline-Zn(II) complex has been described. This method provides an efficient route to highly substituted chromans in good isolated yields with high stereoselectivities (up to 95:5 dr and 91% ee). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Ph3P-catalyzed [3+2] cycloaddition of 2-phenyl-4- arylidene-5(4H)-oxazolones with benzyl 2,3-butadienoate has been developed for the efficient synthesis of structurally diverse and conformationally constrained aspartic acid analogues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]