About this Research Topic

Background

Mesoporous nanomaterials have attracted attention in research for various applications including biomedical, catalysis, absorption and removal of pollutants, and optoelectronic applications. As catalysts, they can promote oxidation, reduction, hydrolysis, and polymerization reactions; enhance the catalytic activity, selectivity, and stability by providing large surface areas, accessible pores, and functional groups. They can adsorb carbon dioxide, hydrogen, methane, water, and organic pollutants. Other known applications include gas storage, separation, purification, and sensing. Mesoporous nanomaterials are used for the fabrication of optical devices due to their luminescence, photoluminescence, fluorescence, and plasmonic properties. As a result, they can be used for fabrication of light-emitting diodes, solar cells, sensors, and for imaging. Biomedical applications include their capability as drug carriers for, genes, proteins, and other biomolecules. As a result, they can improve the solubility, bioavailability, and controlled release of the loaded agents by exploiting their porosity, biocompatibility, large surface area to volume ratio, and surface modification. Their applications in photodynamic therapy have been widely reported.

As a viable alternative to conventional anticancer therapies, photodynamic therapy has endured significant translation limitations due to several challenges, including tumor microenvironment hypoxia, poor solubility of most photosensitizers, their quenching due to aggregation, non-specific photosensitizer delivery, shallow light penetration depth, and poor cancer cell targeting. The application of nanoparticles as photosensitizer carriers and delivery systems for photodynamic therapy has been investigated to reduce some of these challenges, through the fabrication of multifunctional nanoconjugate systems, in order to integrate agents for ameliorating these challenges in a single nanoconjugate system. Due to their increased effective surface area, mesoporous nanomaterials, including mesoporous silica, covalent organic frameworks, metal organic frameworks, and supramolecular organic frameworks have been investigated for photodynamic therapy applications. Metal organic frameworks belong to a class of compounds which consist of metal atoms or metal clusters coordinated to organic ligands to form macromolecular super structures, with pores that are large enough to host free drug molecules including photodynamic therapy photosensitizers. This project will focus on covalent organic frameworks, metal organic frameworks, supramolecular organic frameworks, and similar mesoporous superstructures, using the metal organic frameworks terminology for all of them. It will present the innovations developed for applications in photodynamic therapy, combinations and related applications.

We welcome original research, review, mini review and perspective articles on themes on the applications of metal organic frameworks in photodynamic therapy including, but not limited to the following:

• Synthesis of metal organic frameworks for photodynamic therapy applications

• Synthesis of metal organic frameworks for sonodynamic therapy applications

• Synthesis of metal organic frameworks for radiodynamic therapy applications

• Synthesis and applications of metal organic frameworks for combination therapies

• Synthesis and applications of metal organic frameworks for hypoxia amelioration

• Synthesis and applications of metal organic frameworks for imaging in photodynamic therapy

• Stimulus responsive metal organic frameworks nanoconjugates

• Tumor and cancer cell targeting metal organic frameworks nanoconjugates

• Enhanced light penetration depth of human tissue

Keywords: metal organic frameworks, photodynamic therapy, sonodynamic therapy, radiodynamic therapy, combination therapies, hypoxia amelioration, imaging in photodynamic therapy, stimulus responsive release, tumour and cancer cell targeting, tissue light penetratio

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