Metal-Organic Frameworks in Biomedicine

Metal-organic frameworks (MOF) or coordination polymers through their tunable composition, structure, pore size, and volume, easy functionalization, flexible network and accessible metal sites, possess many advantages for the adsorption and release of biomolecules compared to other carriers such as inorganic porous solids or organic polymers. A method of releasing high amounts of drugs consists in making a bioactive MOF based on the drug itself as the linker and release it through the degradation of the MOF itself, or use a bioactive metal as the inorganic cation, to introduce additional properties such as antibacterial activity or imaging properties. MOFs have shown so far the highest loading capacities of therapeutic molecules associated, in most cases, to the possibility of controlling the release of their cargo. Very large differences in terms of kinetics of release have been observed so far either when changing the drug for a given MOF or using different MOFs for the same biomolecule.