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The emerging field of photopharmacology aims to use light as an external stimulus to activate drug molecules, and do so with a high degree of control over the time and place where this happens – a conceptually straightforward task, which in fact requires an interdisciplinary effort across both chemical synthesis and light delivery technology.
Unlike conventional antibiotics, which have a long-lasting presence in the body and the environment leading to antibiotic resistance, and chemotherapy agents, which can easily affect healthy cells as a side-effect of treatment, a molecule whose therapeutic action can be switched on and switched off again by the action of light could have some dramatic advantages.
