Abstract
Artificial nanoscale enzyme-mimics (nanozymes) are promising functional alternatives to natural enzymes and have aroused great interest due to their inherent in vivo stability, affordability, and high catalytic ability. Iron-based nanozymes are one of the most investigated synthetic nanomaterials with versatile enzyme-like catalytic properties and have demonstrated remarkable relevance to a variety of biomedical applications, especially biocatalytic therapy against tumor indications. Nevertheless, despite the recent advances in biology and nanotechnology, the therapeutic performance of iron-based nanozymes in vivo is still limited by technical issues such as low catalytic efficiency and lack of tumor specificity. In this mini review, we briefly summarized the representative studies of iron-based nanozymes, while special emphasis was placed on the current challenges and future direction regarding the therapeutic implementation of iron-based nanozymes for the development of advanced tumor therapies with improved availability and biosafety.
Highlights
Enzymes are a class of powerful catalysts that are responsible for accelerating various chemical reactions in the human body and are required to promote numerous biological processes, such as metabolism, detoxification, and biosynthesis (DeBerardinis and Chandel, 2016; Huang et al, 2019; Leveson-Gower et al, 2019; Wu et al, 2019)
Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) are a class of biocompatible and degradable inorganic nanomaterials that have been widely explored for tumor diagnosis and therapy, which refers to small nanocrystals composed of iron oxide
Despite the excellent therapeutic performance of iron nanozymes demonstrated in vitro and in vivo, it should be recognized that a tumor is a highly complex disease and the efficacy of Iron-based nanozymes (INs)-mediated biocatalytic tumor therapy may be affected by a variety of issues in the clinical context
Summary
Enzymes are a class of powerful catalysts that are responsible for accelerating various chemical reactions in the human body and are required to promote numerous biological processes, such as metabolism, detoxification, and biosynthesis (DeBerardinis and Chandel, 2016; Huang et al, 2019; Leveson-Gower et al, 2019; Wu et al, 2019) Owing to their potential effect on catalyzing the chemical reaction, enzymes have been exploited to inhibit tumor proliferation. Some representative examples are ferromagnetic nanoparticles and Prussian blue (PB) nanoparticles, which may provide critical benefits for tumor treatment including Fenton-augmented ROS stress and hypoxia amelioration. These promising features of iron-based nanozymes have inspired great scientific interest for therapeutic intervention against a variety of tumor indications
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