Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as biomolecules drug delivery systems for anticancer purposes

Abstract

Metal-organic frameworks (MOF) have been studied for infinite applications. Among these, anticancer therapy has surely attracted great interest due to the intrinsic characteristics of MOFs: large surface area, tuneable porosity, remarkable biocompatibility, easy production, and the possibility to further functionalize the realized nanoparticles are the main reasons that make MOFs the ideal candidates to overcome traditional chemotherapy limits and resistance. Smart MOFs are becoming particularly relevant, as they can be activated by specific endogenous or exogenous stimuli and release their cargo only under the selected conditions. Tumor microenvironment (TME) offers the possibility to take advantage of its peculiar composition to design and build smart nanoparticles, able to selectively release the therapeutic payload only in the environment surrounding cancer cells or directly in the intracellular environment. In this review, we have summarized novel and innovative works describing anticancer MOF-based nanoparticles loaded with biomolecules published in the last three years. The reported papers have been selected with special focus on TME-responsive MOFs and the synthetic procedures employed by research groups have been reported for almost all works, to further underline the myriad of possibilities offered by these hybrid metal-organic structures.

Keywords: Antitumor; Biomolecules; Drug delivery systems; Metal-organic frameworks (MOF); ZIF-8.