Materials with aggregation-induced emission characteristics for applications in diagnosis, theragnosis, disease mechanism study and personalized medicine

Investigations on healthcare-related subjects are becoming increasingly popular among scientists, focusing on the early diagnosis of diseases, innovations in disease treatments and gaining mechanistic insights into disease occurrence, development and recovery. Fluorescent materials with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) characteristics are widely employed in healthcare-related research. By taking advantage of their strong solid-state emission, excellent photostability, fast and sensitive fluorescence responses, and good biocompatibility, materials with AIE attributes are widely employed in pre-clinical diagnosis and mechanistic studies on biological processes. Besides, some AIE-active materials also demonstrate the ability to sensitize the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and have been utilized in photodynamic therapy (PDT). With fluorescence response, AIE-active photosensitizers could light up the targets and exert therapeutic effects at the same time, which enables the theragnosis of infections and tumours. In this review, we select some representative examples of fluorescent materials with AIE attributes and introduce their applications in healthcare-related areas, aiming to illustrate the recent advances in pre-clinical diagnosis, theragnosis, disease mechanism studies and personalized medicines. Since investigations on AIE materials are developing rapidly, we could not cover all reference papers in this review. This review is expected to provide a general idea about the recent progress in this area, rather than a comprehensive encyclopedia to cover all related works.