Recent advances in amino acid-metal coordinated nanomaterials for biomedical applications

Metal and amino acid (AA), as two kinds of entities, have been widely involved in biomaterials and nanomedicines. Recently, the marriage of them has developed new nanoformulations, amino acid-metal coordinated nanomaterials (AMCNs), which show great biomedical application potential in cancer therapy, antibacterial applications, biomedical imaging, etc. With the respective characteristics of metal and AA with rich biological and chemical properties, AMCNs can not only act as drug carriers with specific tumor targeting ability, but also realize synergistic therapy and imaging-guided therapy. Although the design and synthesis of amino acid-metal coordinated nanomaterials have been in-depth investigated, there are few systematic reviews on their biomedical application. In this review, we give a comprehensive summary of recent progresses in the design, fabrication, and biomedical applications of AMCNs. We also propose the future outlooks and challenges in aforementioned field. We expect that this review would contribute some inspiration for future research and development for amino acid metal coordinated nanomaterials.