New Chemistry of Making Porphyrin-based Nanostructures

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Porphyrins are the endogenous chromophores of nature such as hemes in red blood cells and chlorophylls in green plants. Porphyrins and porphyrin-like molecules are well known for their applications in energy (as dye-sensitized solar cells) and in medicine (as photodynamic therapy agents and fluorescent probes) but rarely investigated for its potential for its nanoscale properties until now. Supported by the previous NSERC discovery grant, my lab discovered ‘porphysomes’, the first all-organic nanoparticles with intrinsic multimodal photonic properties (Nature Materials 2011), hailed as “one particle to rule them all” (Nature Methods 2011) and named as one of the “Top Ten Cancer Breakthroughs in 2011” by the Canadian Cancer Society.