Current advances in versatile metal-organic frameworks for cancer therapy

Advanced strategies have been developed to overcome limitations of traditional pharmacological treatments like low specificity and severe side effects. Remarkably, the application of nano drug delivery systems (NDDS) to improve intracellular uptake has promising prospects. Among other proposed materials, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) formed by the assembly of metal ions and organic ligands exhibit excellent advantages as a nanocarrier, such as high drug loading, excellent biocompatibility and biodegradability, controllable drug release as well as easy modification. Thus, MOFs are widely used in NDDS. Based on this, scientists devoted much effort to designing multi-functional and versatile MOFs to achieve desirable therapeutic effects. This review introduced the latest MOFs for tumor treatment. Here, the classification of MOFs was introduced and, some responsive MOFs to control the release behavior of drugs were reviewed. Besides, some advanced active targeting MOFs to improve drug accumulation in tumor were summarized. Finally, the remaining challenges encountered by MOFs were discussed and proposed, which could provide guidance for developing more intelligent NDDS based on the promising materials of MOFs.