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Bhandari, Srijana

Publications and source records attributed to Bhandari, Srijana.

Visible light-activatable platinum( IV ) prodrugs harnessing CD36 for ovarian cancer therapy

We hereby engineered photoactivatable Pt( IV ) metallodrugs that harness CD36 to target ovarian cancer cells. Pt( IV ) compounds mimic the structure of fatty acids and take advantage of CD36 as a “Trojan horse” to gain entry into the cells. We confirmed that CD36-dependent entry occurs using graphite furnace atomic absorption spectroscopy with ovarian cancer cells expressing different levels of CD36 and a CD36 inhibitor, SSO. Once the Pt( IV ) metallodrugs enter the cancer cells, they can be activated to form Pt(II) with characteristics of cisplatin under visible light (490 nm) irradiation, promoting photoinduced electron transfer from the attached fluorophore to the metal center. Finally, this light-induced activation can increase the cytotoxicity of the Pt( IV ) metallodrugs by up to 20 times toward ovarian cancer cells, inducing DNA damage and enabling efficient elimination of drug-resistant cancer cells.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Molecular-Level Exploration of the Structure-Function Relations Underlying Interfacial Charge Transfer in the Subphthalocyanine/C 60 Organic Photovoltaic System

The arrangement of organic molecules at the donor-acceptor interface in an organic photovoltaic (OPV) cell can have a strong effect on the generation of charge carriers and thereby cell performance. In this paper, we report the molecular-level exploration of the ensemble of interfacial donor-acceptor pair geometries and the charge-transfer (CT) rates to which they give rise. Our approach combines molecular-dynamics simulations, electronic structure calculations, machine learning, and rate theory. This approach is applied to the boron subphthalocyanine chloride (donor) and C 60 (acceptor) OPV system. In this work we find that the interface is dominated by a previously unreported donor-acceptor pair edge geometry, which contributes significantly to device performance in a manner that depends on the initial conditions. Quantitative relations between the morphology and CT rates are established, which can be used to advance the design of more efficient OPV devices.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

Screened Range-Separated Hybrid Functional with Polarizable Continuum Model Overcomes Challenges in Describing Triplet Excitations in the Condensed Phase Using TDDFT

Long range-corrected (LRC) or range-separated hybrid (RSH) functionals where the long-range (LR) limit of electronic interactions is set to the exact exchange have been shown to correct the tendency of traditional density functional theory (DFT) to underestimate the frontier orbital gap. Consequently, the use of such functionals in calculating electronic excited states using linear response based time-dependent DFT (TDDFT) has been successful in correcting the tendency for underestimating the energies of charge transfer states by DFT-based calculations. More recently formulations of functionals that attenuate the LR limit to address condensed-phase effects to polarize the electronic density have been reported. In particular screened RSH (SRSH) combined with polarizable continuum model (PCM) was benchmarked successfully in reproducing the fundamental gap and charge transfer state energies of molecular systems in the condensed phase. Here we use SRSH-PCM to address triplet excited states, and show its success in obtaining correspondence of the low-lying triplet states to the singlet–triplet gap in a similar way that the fundamental orbital gap corresponds to electron removal and addition energies. Importantly, the accuracy of the SRSH-PCM in calculating triplet excitations stands on the polarization consistent framework in addressing the scalar dielectric constant and without affecting the optimal tuning by triplet energies. Finally, the prospect of even further improving the SRSH-PCM accuracy in calculating triplet states can be achieved by optimal tuning on the basis of the spin multiplicity gap.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗