This review highlights gel microsphere-mediated photodynamic therapy's effectiveness in hepatocellular carcinoma, indicating its potential to improve treatment outcomes.
Conventional hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) treatments suffer from insufficient efficacy and severe toxic side effects. This review addresses these issues by focusing on gel microsphere-mediated photodynamic therapy (PDT) as a novel strategy. It outlines the core properties, classifications, and stimulus-responsive mechanisms of gel microspheres, as well as their structure-function compatibility with photosensitizers. The work highlights how gel microspheres enable targeted delivery, tumor microenvironment-responsive release, and synergistic effects with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and immunotherapy to enhance therapeutic efficacy while reducing off-target damage. Additionally, it discusses current challenges including material parameter controllability and clinical translation hurdles, providing insights for the development of precise and personalized HCC treatments.
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Fan et al. (2026) studied this question.
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