Phototherapy is a noninvasive cancer treatment that relies on the interaction between light and photoactive agents. These photoactive agents are typically organic dyes, but their hydrophobic nature and self-aggregation tendency in biological media greatly restricts the development of highly effective phototherapeutic systems. In the past decade, functional dye-doped metal–organic framework (MOF)-based phototherapy has attracted enormous interest because organic dyes can be encapsulated and isolated within the MOF structure to show superior treatment efficacy. In addition to incorporating the reported phototherapeutic dyes into MOF as the ligand or the guest in the pores, the construction of an MOF-based phototherapy agent can also be extended to these dye units that are previously inactive for phototherapy. Thus, this review focuses on the emerging development of phototherapeutic MOFs that exhibited better performance than the involving dye units due to the controlled dye aggregation within the MOF. The related mechanisms and some emerging future directions of dye-doped MOF-based phototherapy are also discussed and summarized.

光疗是一种非侵入性癌症治疗，它依赖于光和光活性剂之间的相互作用。这些光活性剂通常是有机染料，但它们在生物介质中的疏水性和自聚集倾向极大地限制了高效光疗系统的发展。在过去的十年中，基于功能性染料掺杂金属有机框架（MOF）的光疗法引起了极大的兴趣，因为有机染料可以封装和隔离在 MOF 结构中以显示出卓越的治疗效果。除了将报道的光疗染料作为配体或孔中的客体掺入 MOF 之外，基于 MOF 的光疗剂的构建还可以扩展到这些以前对光疗无活性的染料单元。因此，本综述重点关注光疗 MOF 的新兴发展，由于 MOF 内受控的染料聚集，其表现出比相关染料单元更好的性能。还讨论和总结了染料掺杂 MOF 光疗的相关机制和一些新兴的未来方向。