Metal-organic frameworks as potential drug delivery systems

Abstract

Benefiting from the unique advantages of MOFs materials, efficient delivery of various kinds of drugs has been achieved in some MOF materials. However, it is only the outset of MOFs in drug delivery system, and numerous work need to be done before clinical applications, for example, studying their in vivo toxicity, exploring degradation mechanisms so as to establish real stability of MOFs in body's liquid, providing appropriated surface modification avenue for MOFs, and researching in vivo efficiency and pharmacokinetics of drug-loaded MOFs.

Bio-Inspired Metal-Organic Frameworks in the Pharmaceutical World: A Brief Review

“…Both exogenous (not intervening in the body cycles) and endogenous (constitutive part of body composition) linkers have been used in MOF synthesis for drug delivery, with the first group having a higher prevalence [21,[25][26][27][28][29]57]. It is also worth noting that if the therapeutic molecule is directly used as a linker, no large pores are required and the release of the drug molecule is achieved directly through the degradation of the solid, without any side effects arising from the release of a non-active ligand [26,52].…”

“…MOFs are still widely synthesized using solvo/hydrothermal techniques, the most common methods to obtain coordination networks [21,25,28,29]. Nevertheless microemulsion synthesis [80] is also a typical method and interesting alternatives are being used based on environmental-friendly synthetic routes: ionothermal [81], microwave, ultrasound-assisted, and sonochemical synthesis [21,25,28], as well as mechanochemistry [82,83].…”

“…Likewise, nanoporous materials recently became of pertinent use in the medicinal and pharmacological fields for drug storage, delivery and controlled release in addition to applications in imaging and sensing for therapeutic and diagnostic [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Particularly, metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have generated large interest owing to their versatile architectures [35] and their promising applications not only in ion exchange, adsorption and gas storage [36][37][38][39][40][41], separation processes [42], heterogeneous catalysis [43,44], polymerization reactions [45,46], luminescence [47], non-linear optics [48] and magnetism [49], but also as drug carriers, systems for drug delivery [22,23,50,51], contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) [21] and systems with potential use in other biomedical applications [23].…”

“…Both hypotheses suffer from important drawbacks: low drug-storage capacity, too rapid delivery and solid degradation that brings toxicity concerns [23,25,26,28,29,52]. Extended metal-ligand networks with metal nodes and bridging organic ligands such as coordination networks, porous coordination networks (PCNs), porous coordination polymers (PCPs) and MOFs have attracted great attention in the last years [24,25,28,53,54].…”

“…Extended metal-ligand networks with metal nodes and bridging organic ligands such as coordination networks, porous coordination networks (PCNs), porous coordination polymers (PCPs) and MOFs have attracted great attention in the last years [24,25,28,53,54]. Particularly, MOFs with biological-friendly composition emerged as new drug carriers capable of tackling these problems [21,23,25,26,28,29,55,56].…”