Nanoscale metal–organic frameworks as smart nanocarriers for cancer therapy

Cancer is one of the serious diseases to human life. Early and precise cancer diagnosis and timely therapy are in urgent need nowadays. Due to the advantages of porous structures and tunable properties, metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are becoming type of rapidly developing and attractive supports used in biomedicine, which have been widely applied in the fields of chemistry, biology, materials science, etc. Particularly, nanoscale MOFs (nMOFs) with more accessible active sites and improved stability are ideal platforms for biological and clinical applications in vitro and in vivo. This review article summarizes the recent progresses in nMOFs based nanoplatforms for drug delivery and cancer therapy. Different techniques using nMOFs are systematically summarized including chemotherapy, photodynamic therapy (PDT), photothermal therapy (PTT), chemodynamic therapy (CDT), radiotherapy (RT), and the combined therapy methods. Finally, a brief conclusion and outlook for biomedical applications of this special field is provided. We expect this review could be helpful for future designing and fabrication of multi-functional nMOFs platforms for drug delivery, disease therapy, and other biomedical applications.