Recent advances in porphyrin-based MOFs for cancer therapy and diagnosis therapy

Porphyrins and porphyrin derivatives have attracted significant interest in the fields of catalysis, biosensing, gas storage, solar cells, and biomedical applications owing to their outstanding photophysical and electrochemical properties. Nevertheless, their biological application especially in the therapy and diagnosis of cancer is severely hindered by certain inherent limitations such as self-quenching, weak absorption in the biological spectral window, and poor chemical and optical stability. Porphyrin-based metal organic frameworks (MOFs), a family of novel hybrid porous coordination polymers, have been developed to overcome the limitations of porphyrins and enable their biomedical applications. Porphyrin-based MOFs are constructed using metal ions or clusters and porphyrin ligands through a self-assembly process. Porphyrin-based MOFs maintain the specific properties of porphyrins and can be loaded or modified with functional molecules or drugs to impart therapeutic and imaging abilities. In this review, we discuss the different synthetic approaches of porphyrin-based MOFs and examine the current developments and achievements of porphyrin-based MOFs in the field of biomedical applications, especially cancer therapy and bioimaging in detail. Finally, we discuss the challenges in the biomedical applications of porphyrin-based MOFs and present possible research directions to achieve highly efficient therapeutic effects and high-quality imaging for cancer theranostics.