Current and promising applications of UiO-based MOFs in breast cancer therapy

Breast cancer is a malignant tumor disease with a high mortality rate. Therefore, improving breast cancer's efficacy is a research direction people have been paying attention to. Traditional therapies such as chemotherapy, phototherapy, and chemodynamic therapy have achieved certain results in treating breast cancer, but there are still some shortcomings. Nanomaterials have been used for in vivo tumor imaging, cancer-related biomolecular biomarker analysis, and targeted drug delivery, and excellent nano-treatment platforms have been constructed with the continuous development of nanotechnology. Among many nanomaterials, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted particular attention. MOFs are a new type of material with a three-dimensional structure formed by combining transition metals and organic ligands. UiO-MOFs find their main application in the area of catalysis. Many researchers believe that it can also have a notable impact in cancer treatment as drug delivery. However, until now, there has not been any new review that only focuses on breast cancer by using different treatment approaches. Hence, in the presented review, the progress in UiO-based MOFs for breast cancer treatment using radiotherapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, phototherapeutic techniques, or a combination of two or more techniques has been explored. The presented review also provides insight into the current limitations and prospects of UiO-MOFs for cancer therapy.