Photodynamic therapy of cancer-associated infections.

Pathogens can be involved in tumor initiation, promotion, and progression through different mechanisms, and their treatment can prevent new cancer cases, improve outcomes, and revert poor-prognostic phenotypes. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) successfully treats different types of cancers and infections and, therefore, has a unique potential to address their combination. However, we believe this potential has been underutilized, and few researchers have investigated the impacts of PDT of both infection-related and cancer-related outcomes at once. This review presents the main agents behind cancer-associated infections (CAIs), the PDT protocols that have been tested on them, and their key findings. Additionally, we discuss the key aspects of PDT that make it ideal for CAI treatment, and what knowledge gaps need to be filled in order to make it successful.