Abstract
Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are newly emerged crystalline porous polymers with well-defined skeletons and nanopores mainly consisted of light-weight elements (H, B, C, N and O) linked by dynamic covalent bonds. Compared with conventional materials, COFs possess some unique and attractive features, such as large surface area, pre-designable pore geometry, excellent crystallinity, inherent adaptability and high flexibility in structural and functional design, thus exhibiting great potential for various applications. Especially, their large surface area and tunable porosity and π conjugation with unique photoelectric properties will enable COFs to serve as a promising platform for drug delivery, bioimaging, biosensing and theranostic applications. In this review, we trace the evolution of COFs in terms of linkages and highlight the important issues on synthetic method, structural design, morphological control and functionalization. And then we summarize the recent advances of COFs in the biomedical and pharmaceutical sectors and conclude with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities of COFs for biomedical purposes. Although currently still at its infancy stage, COFs as an innovative source have paved a new way to meet future challenges in human healthcare and disease theranostic.
Highlights
Recent decades have witnessed a surge of explorations of biomedical applications in biosensing [1], bioimaging [2,3], chemotherapy [4,5], gene therapy [6,7,8,9], immunotherapy [10,11], photodynamic therapy (PDT) [12], photothermal therapy (PTT) [13,14], tissue engineering [15,16] and others [17]
Compared to boronate-ester or imine linked Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) prepared by solvothermal synthesis, covalent triazine-based frameworks (CTFs) show poor crystallinity since the conditions of reversible reaction are very harsh
Microwave synthesis has a long history in organic chemistry [156] but it was not until 2009 that this method was used in preparing COFs by Cooper and co-workers [144]
Summary
Recent decades have witnessed a surge of explorations of biomedical applications in biosensing [1], bioimaging [2,3], chemotherapy [4,5], gene therapy [6,7,8,9], immunotherapy [10,11], photodynamic therapy (PDT) [12], photothermal therapy (PTT) [13,14], tissue engineering [15,16] and others [17].
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