Magnetic nanoscale metal organic frameworks for potential targeted anticancer drug delivery, imaging and as an MRI contrast agent

The development of a novel multifunctional porous nanoplatform for targeted anticancer drug delivery with cell imaging and magnetic resonance imaging has been realised in the current work. Here we have developed a magnetic nanoscale metal organic frameworks (NMOF) for potential targeted drug delivery. These magnetic NMOFs were fabricated by incorporation of Fe3O4 nanoparticles into porous isoreticular metal organic frameworks (IRMOF-3). To achieve targeted drug delivery towards cancer cells specifically, folic acid was conjugated to the NMOF surface. Then, the fluorescent molecule rhodamine B isothiocyanate (RITC) was conjugated to the NMOFs for biological imaging applications. The synthesized magnetic NMOFs were fully characterised by FTIR, powder XRD, XPS, SQUID, TGA, TEM, FESEM, and DLS. The synthesized magnetic NMOFs were observed to be smaller than 100 nm and were found to be nontoxic towards human cervix adenocarcinoma (HeLa) and murine fibroblast (NIH3T3) cells according to cell viability assays. The cancer chemotherapy drug paclitaxel was conjugated to the magnetic NMOFs through hydrophobic interactions with a relatively high loading capacity. Moreover, these folic acid-conjugated magnetic NMOFs showed stronger T2-weighted MRI contrast towards the cancer cells, justifying their possible significance in imaging.