Porous Inorganic Nanomaterials for Drug Delivery

This chapter reviews specific advances in inorganic porous drug delivery systems. A range of antimicrobial drugs have previously been encapsulated into different mesoporous silica nanomaterials, such as amoxicillin, levofloxacin, Parmetol S15 vancomycin, erythromycin gentamicin and histidine kinase autophosphorylation inhibitors. Amongst different drug delivery systems, porous materials are emerging as state-of-the-art carriers with ability to entrap various types of actives within their porous structure. Mesoporous materials are emerging as attractive platforms for designing diverse types of drug delivery systems. The ability to design their mesostructure with different pore geometries, sizes and arrangements allows the entrapment of several types of drugs\biological molecules and provides rational, predicted and on-demand release profiles. Several physiological and anatomical barriers are confronted by drug carriers preventing them from targeting selective sites, such as distribution from the blood to the extracellular compartment of a tumour, binding to target-cell membranes before endocytosis, delivering their payload intracellularly and finally reaching subcellular target sites.