This themed issue provides up-to-date review and research articles covering the theranostic applications in the combined fields of protease research, diagnostics and drug development.

Drug delivery systems (DDSs) have been extensively studied as carriers to deliver small molecule chemo-drugs to tumors for cancer therapy. The therapeutic efficiency of chemo-drugs is crucially dependent on the effective drug concentrations in tumors and cancer cells. Novel DDSs that can simultaneously unveil drug distribution, drug release/activation behaviors and offer early evaluation of the...

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is the world's most common autoimmune disease mainly characterized by a chronic inflammation of multiple synovial joints. Rheumatologists now have a whole range of treatment options including glucocorticoids (GCs), classical synthetic and biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (cs- and bDMARDS), resulting in a tremendous improvement in treatment outcomes for ...

Theranostic nanoparticles offer the potential for mixing and matching disparate diagnostic and therapeutic functionalities within a single nanoparticle for the personalized treatment of diseases. In this article, we present composite iron oxide-gadolinium-containing Prussian blue nanoparticles (Fe3O4@GdPB) as a novel theranostic agent for T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and phototh...

Molecular imaging based personalized therapy has been a fascinating concept for individualized therapeutic strategy, which is able to attain the highest efficacy and reduce adverse effects in certain patients. Theranostics, which integrates diagnostic testing to detect molecular targets for particular therapeutic modalities, is one of the key technologies that contribute to the success of perso...

A smart dual-targeted theranostic agent becomes highly fluorescent and phototoxic only when its linker is cleaved by tumor-associated lysosomal enzyme cathepsin B after internalization into folate receptor-positive cancer cells.

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether an intravenously injected cathepsin-B activatable theranostic agent (L-SR15) would be cleaved in and release a fluorescent agent (chlorin-e6) in mouse atheromata, allowing both the diagnostic visualization and therapeutic application of these fluorophores as photosensitizers during photodynamic therapy to attenuate plaque-destabilizing cathepsin-B activity by se...

The complimentary ability of different noninvasive imaging technologies with therapeutic modalities can be used in tandem providing high-resolution and highly sensitive imaging of events at the molecular and cellular level providing a means for image-guided therapy. There is increasing interest in using porphyrin-based photosensitizers as theranostics to take advantages of their near-infrared f...

This theme issue provides a comprehensive collection of original research articles on the creation of diverse types of theranostic upconversion nanoparticles, their fundamental interactions in biology, as well as their biophotonic applications in noninvasive diagnostics and therapy.

This themed issue continues the focus on the recent developments of nanoscaled theranostic systems for early and accurate disease diagnosis, especially cancer diagnosis, as well as effective cancer treatment and management.