Heterogeneous surface architectured metal-organic frameworks for cancer therapy, imaging, and biosensing: A state-of-the-art review

With recent progress in inorganic material based nanoplatforms for cancer therapy and imaging, multiple nano vehicles have been developed and evaluated. These recent advancements in material science led to the development of metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and nano MOFs (nMOFs) as the potential and versatile delivery platforms for cancer theranostic. With a vast amount of ongoing research on MOFs, various surface architectured MOFs for with variable properties have been developed and tested. The concept of subcellular targeted therapy of cancer has also been employed using MOFs which demonstrated significantly enhanced anticancer therapy. These MOFs have been developed in a way to provide them stimuli-responsive drug release property which can be utilized for externally guided therapy of cancer. Apart from cellular and subcellular targeted platforms and stimuli-responsive platforms, MOFs have also been explored in the field of bioimaging and biosensing. Multiple types of biosensing platforms based on MOFs and nMOFs have been proposed for biosensing of biomolecules related to cancer for sensing and early detection. The bioimaging probes based on MOFs have been employed for multiple diagnostic platforms. The review gives the recent updates for the abovementioned topics along with the toxicity aspects of MOFs for human use. The review overall gives a detailed overview of research done to date in the field of MOFs based nanoplatforms for cancer theranostics.