Department of Chemistery, Graduate School of Science
I am currently working on the synthesis of the chemical species rhenium hexanuclear clusters, the investigation of their photoluminescence behaviour and their medical applications.
Rhenium hexanuclear clusters can introduce a variety of organic or inorganic materials into the six terminal positions, allowing the photoluminescence quantum yield and redox potential to be tuned. My research aims to synthesise clusters with a new idea in which other luminescent complex units are introduced as terminal ligands to improve the luminescence quantum yield.
It is known that when luminescent complexes are accumulated in cancer cells and photoexcited, their triplet excited state undergoes energy transfer to the triplet ground state of oxygen, producing reactive oxygen species that attack tumours. This is called photodynamic therapy. In this study, based on the characteristics of rhenium hexanuclear clusters, such as absorbing light that is highly permeable to living organisms and their long emission lifetime, I believe that they could be applied to photodynamic therapy if clusters with higher energy efficiency are developed.