The fullerene family, and especially C₆₀, has delighted the scientific community during the last 25 years with perspective applications in a wide variety of fields, including the biological and the biomedical domains. Several biomedical uses have been explored using water-soluble C₆₀-derivatives. However, the employment of fullerenes for drug delivery is still at an early stage of development. The design and synthesis of multifunctionalized and multimodal C₆₀ systems able to cross the cell membranes and efficiently deliver active molecules is an attracting challenge that involves multidisciplinary strategies. Promising results have emerged in the last years, bringing fullerenes again to the front of interest. Herein, the state of the art of this emerging field is presented and illustrated with some of the most representative examples.

Despite the increasing interest of the scientific community in carbon nanotubes and graphene, fullerene C₆₀ still plays an important role in the family of nanocarbons. A quarter of a century of research on fullerenes has been dedicated to understanding the way to produce stable, well-characterized and highly soluble fullerene derivatives, which retain the original properties of C₆₀. The applications in a wide number of fields, especially on new materials design, have enriched the literature with fascinating examples where fullerenes are directly involved. We report here a brief summary of recent achievements in some exciting applications of fullerene derivatives.

Graphene sheets have been functionalized with a PAMAM dendron, finding that graphene can be efficiently functionalized all over the surface, or only at the edges, depending on the reactions used in the functionalization process.

A salophen cobalt(II) complex enables water oxidation at neutral pH in photoactivated sacrificial cycles under visible light, thus confirming the high appeal of earth abundant single site catalysis for artificial photosynthesis.