Chemists create iridium compounds for the synthesis of 'smart' antitumor drugs

Chemists at St. Petersburg University have developed a new family of luminescent iridium complexes that, for the first time, achieve a unique mechanism of photoactivated proton transfer. In the future, this discovery will potentially create a fundamentally new class of “smart” anti-tumor drugs that can be activated directly inside tumor cells and tracked in real time by the color change of their glow.