Adsorption and Advanced Materials: Drug Delivery

Although there have been great advances in cancer treatment, where survival rates have doubled in the last 40 years, cancer remains a key health concern. This is especially true for hard-to-treat cancers such as mesothelioma where very little improvement has been obtained in decades. A main challenge is the development of better drugs, including treatments based on macromolecules capable of interfere the cell signalling system such as RNAs and inhibitor peptides. These macromolecules are potentially the most powerful cancer drugs that exist, but still there is no feasible way of getting them delivered to the tumour, and therefore require a drug delivery system.

A new line of research from our lab has been the development of computational tools (J. Mat. Chem. B 2013) to understand this process, and the design of functional materials based on amorphous MOFs for drug delivery (Chem. Commun. 2015, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2017). We have advanced in creating materials with outstanding loading capacities, extended drug-release times, and grafted functionalities to improve their performance (Adv. Health. Mat. 2016, Chem 2017, ACS. Appl. Mat. Interfaces 2017). We are working in the understanding of how the external surface of the MOF affects the endocytosis routes of these materials.

All this has opened new future directions using MOFs as drug delivery vehicles.