In the last decade, metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have shown great prospective as new drug delivery systems (DDSs) due to their unique properties: these materials exhibit fascinating architectures, surfaces, composition, and a rich chemistry of these compounds. The DSSs allow the release of the active pharmaceutical ingredient to accomplish a desired therapeutic response. Over the past few decades, there has been exponential growth of many new classes of coordination polymers, and MOFs have gained popularity over other identified systems due to their higher biocompatibility and versatile loading capabilities. This review presents and assesses the most recent research, findings, and challenges associated with the use of MOFs as DDSs. Among the most commonly used MOFs for investigated-purpose MOFs, coordination polymers and metal complexes based on synthetic and natural polymers, are well known. Specific attention is given to the stimuli- and multistimuli-responsive MOFs-based DDSs. Of great interest in the COVID-19 pandemic is the use of MOFs for combination therapy and multimodal systems.

The rapid increase of industrial activities leads to serious environmental pollution, especially, in aqueous systems and particularly with heavy metals. Cadmium, one of the most poisonous elements, is rapidly accumulated in the human body, therefore, the efficient removal of cadmium ions from wastewater is an urgent need. Coordination networks (CNs) and its subdivision metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), are structured porous composites which present various special properties. In this work two CNs were used as adsorbent materials for the removal of Cd(II) ions from aqueous solutions. By the reaction of CoSO₄·7H₂O and NiSO₄·7H₂O with N,N-bis(phosphonomethyl)glycine (Gly) in hydrothermal conditions two CNs—Co–Gly and Ni–Gly— were synthesized, respectively. Cadmium adsorption onto the studied CNs was conducted in batch mode, and the effect of pH, initial concentration, contact time, temperature and sorbent weight on the sorption process were investigated. Parametric Method 3 (PM3)semi-empirical analyses of the CNs’ structural properties were performed in order to predict the adsorption properties. For this reason, two octahedral models were calculated and computational predictions were compared with the experimental results. Both computational and experimental adsorption studies found that Ni–Gly presents higher affinity for cadmium ions. Moreover, the adsorbent materials can be readily regenerated and recycled without significant loss of cadmium uptake capacity.