Paper Title
Lanthanide Complexes for Medical and Pharmaceutical Applications

Abstract
Lanthanide complexes are attracting increasing attention in medical and pharmaceutical fields, owing to their unique chemical, optical and magnetic properties. Following the success of FDA-approved gadolinium complex-based contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging, lanthanide complexes have been investigated as biomedical probes and therapeutic agents and are highly potential for the clinical practices. Lanthanide complexes typically consist of an organic chromophore and a lanthanide ion. The hybridization of organic molecule and lanthanide ion allows leveraging the properties of these different material systems to achieve novel functions. The complexes have characteristic emission bands and the organic part improves the absorption capacity. The combination of organic dyes and inorganic lanthanides could potentially enable the fine-tuning of excitation ranges and allow large separation between excitation and emission in spectral wavelengths. The complexes havea long lifetime which allows time-gated techniques to remove the background signals. There are a large variety of organic molecules that can be functionalized for various purposes as ligands of the lanthanide complexes. Taking these benefits of lanthanide complexes, we report our recent works in bio-imaging, bio-sensing, drug delivery and photodynamic therapy,and discuss future opportunities and challenges in translating new hybrid materials and associated technologies to clinical practice.