Recent Progress of Nanoscale Metal-Organic Frameworks in Cancer Theranostics and the Challenges of Their Clinical Application

Abstract

The growing incidence of cancer raises an urgent need to develop effective diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. With the rapid development of nanomedicine, nanoscale metal-organic frameworks (NMOFs) presented promising potential in various biomedical applications in the last 2 decades, especially in cancer theranostics. Due to the unique features of NMOFs, including structural diversities, enormous porosity, multifunctionality and biocompatibility, they have been widely used to deliver imaging contrast agents and therapeutic drugs. Moreover, multiple types of contrast agents, anti-cancer drugs and targeting ligands could be co-delivered through one single NMOF to enable combination therapy. Co-delivering system using NMOFs helped to avoid multidrug resistance, to reduce adverse effects, to achieve imaging-guided precise therapy and to enhance anti-cancer efficacy. This review summarized the recent research advances on the application of NMOFs in biomedical imaging and cancer treatments in the last few years. The current challenges that impeding their translation to clinical practices and the perspectives for their future applications were also highlighted and discussed.

Keywords:

• nanomedicine
• theranostic platform
• biomedical imaging
• combination therapy
• clinical translation

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 81372498, 81572967, 81773236, and 81800429); National Project for Improving the Ability of Diagnosis and Treatment of Difficult Diseases, National Key Clinical Speciality Construction Program of China (grant number [2013]544); the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant numbers 2042018kf0065 and 2042018kf1037); Health Commission of Hubei Province Scientific Research Project (grant numbers WJ2019H002 and WJ2019Q047); Wuhan City Huanghe Talents Plan, and Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University Science, Technology and Innovation Seed Fund (grant numbers znpy2016050, znpy2017001, znpy2017049, and znpy2018028).

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.