Mesoporous silica nanoparticles for drug delivery—Recent advances

Mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) have been attracting great attention for the potential biomedical applications in the last decades. Due to the unique properties, such as tunable mesoporous structure, huge surface area, large pore volume, as well as the functional ability of surface, MSNs exhibit high loading capacity for therapeutic active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and controllable release behavior. In this review, the applications of MSNs in pharmaceutics improving the bioavailability, reducing toxicity of loaded drugs, increasing cellular targeted delivery ability and recent advances in drug delivery are summarized.