Iron Nanowires Coated with Metal-Organic Frameworks for Cell-Type-Specific Multimodal Therapy

Targeted therapy has the potential to revolutionize medical approaches to bring us closer to an effective personalized therapy model. In this work, we developed homologous-targeted magnetic nanowires coated with biologics-loaded zeolitic imidazolate frameworks and cellular membranes (ZNWs) to provide an increased therapeutic potential both in vitro and in vivo. In vitro, the uncoated ZNWs combined with laser treatment reduced cancer cell viability by 34.6%, whereas the coated ZNWs combined with laser treatment reduced cancer cell viability by 45.91%. In vivo, ZNWs accumulated selectively in MCF-7 cancer cells and maintained a high intensity for up to 120 h, which reduced tumor growth significantly. Combining gene and tumor ablation treatment with the homologous targeting ability of ZNWs resulted in about 73% cell death. We believe that using such an assembled coating to camouflage delivery vehicles has effective outcomes in terms of improved targeting and therapeutic efficiency and should be studied further for medical translation.