In recent years, pure organic room temperature phosphorescent (RTP) materials have received extensive attention from researchers due to their long-excited state lifetime, large Stokes shift, and rich excited state properties. Compared with heavy metal complexes or inorganic phosphorescent materials, organic phosphorescent materials have a wide range of raw materials, low cost, mild synthesis conditions, light weight, flexibility, large area preparation, and many other advantages. Thus, RTP materials show great potential in the field of data encryption, sensing, organic electroluminescence, biological imaging and others. Organic phosphorescent materials have the characteristics of long-lived luminescence and triplet emission. The use of time-resolved technology can effectively eliminate the background fluorescence interference of biological tissues, which greatly improves the sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio of biosensing and imaging. And through the TTA process with triplet oxygen, it is expected to realize the application of such materials in biological fields such as photodynamic anticancer and antibacterial. Moreover, pure organic phosphorescent materials do not have the toxicity from heavy metals. Therefore, pure organic phosphorescent materials have achieved good applications in biological fields such as biological imaging and cancer treatment. In this review, we summarized the research progress of organic room temperature phosphorescence in biological applications, including bioimaging, biosensing, photodynamic anticancer, antibacterial, etc. Finally, we propose the problems and outlook in this field. © 2022, Materials Review Magazine. All right reserved.
