The simultaneous removal of organic, inorganic, and microbial contaminants from water by one material offers significant advantages when fast, facile, and robust water purification is required. Herein, we present a supported ionic liquid phase (SILP) composite where each component targets a specific type of water contaminant: a polyoxometalate‐ionic liquid (POM‐IL) is immobilized on porous silica, giving the heterogeneous SILP. The water‐insoluble POM‐IL is composed of antimicrobial alkylammonium cations and lacunary polyoxometalate anions with heavy‐metal binding sites. The lipophilicity of the POM‐IL enables adsorption of organic contaminants. The silica support can bind radionuclides. Using the POM‐SILP in filtration columns enables one‐step multi‐contaminant water purification. The results show how multi‐functional POM‐SILPs can be designed for advanced purification applications.

Natural polysaccharides are frequently used in the design of drug delivery systems due to their biocompatibility, biodegradability, and low toxicity. Moreover, they are diverse in structure, size, and charge, and their chemical functional groups can be easily modified to match the needs of the final application and mode of administration. This review focuses on polysaccharidic nanocarriers based on chitosan and hyaluronic acid for small interfering RNA (siRNA) delivery, which are highly positively and negatively charged, respectively. The key properties, strengths, and drawbacks of each polysaccharide are discussed. In addition, their use as efficient nanodelivery systems for gene silencing applications is put into context using the most recent examples from the literature. The latest advances in this field illustrate effectively how chitosan and hyaluronic acid can be modified or associated with other molecules in order to overcome their limitations to produce optimized siRNA delivery systems with promising in vitro and in vivo results.