ABSTRACT

The chapter gives an overview of the most recent advances carried out in the development of porous nanoparticles for drug delivery. The use of nanoparticles in the clinical field has raised a huge interest in the scientific community providing novel treatments against complex diseases in which the conventional pharmacological approaches are not successful, as neurological disorders, antibiotic-resistant infections and cancer, among others. Nanoparticles as drug carriers provide interesting properties such as controlled drug release, improved pharmacokinetic, long resistance and circulation time of the housed therapeutic agents, and significant reduction in the administered dosage as a consequence of the higher tissue and cell selectivity achieved by these nanosystems. Among the different types of nanoparticles developed in the recent years, porous nanosystems are one of the most promising materials due to their excellent loading capacity thanks to the significantly elevated external surface which can vary from 200 to 300 m2·g-1 of porous silicon to up to 10,000 m2·g-1 of metal organic frameworks (MOFs). In this chapter, the most representative porous nanomaterials: mesoporous silica, porous silicon and MOFs will be addressed describing the available strategies for their surface functionalization in order to provide them with smart properties as stimuli-responsive drug release capacity and tissue and/or cell targeting abilities, among others.