Porous silicon advances in drug delivery and immunotherapy

Abstract

Biomedical applications of porous silicon include drug delivery, imaging, diagnostics and immunotherapy. This review summarizes new silicon particle fabrication techniques, dynamics of cellular transport, advances in the multistage vector approach to drug delivery, and the use of porous silicon as immune adjuvants. Recent findings support superior therapeutic efficacy of the multistage vector approach over single particle drug delivery systems in mouse models of ovarian and breast cancer. With respect to vaccine development, multivalent presentation of pathogen-associated molecular patterns on the particle surface creates powerful platforms for immunotherapy, with the porous matrix able to carry both antigens and immune modulators.

Materials for Immunotherapy

“…Details of the immunomodulatory effects associated with mesoporous silica are discussed in detail in Section . These aforementioned properties make MSNs promising candidates for use in immunotherapy …”

Protein attachment to silane-functionalized porous silicon: A comparison of electrostatic and covalent attachment

“…Another property that makes pSi especially adequate for biomedical applications is that it completely dissociates in aqueous solutions with pH above 7 to silicic acid, what raises great interest in drug delivery research [26]. The porous matrix enables many different possibilities of functionalization, drugs adsorption, and loading of different molecules that make it attractive for the delivery of chemotherapeutics [27]. The delivery is impacted by the geometry, the surface modification path and the degradation [28].…”

Sharpening Si Nanocrystals on the Bulk Surface by Nanoscale Electrochemistry through Controlling the Hole Current with the Irradiation of Near-Infrared Laser

“…It is well-known that anodization 8 can produce pores or cylindrical cavities in the anodized layer on the Si substrates, usually referenced as porous silicon, which are made use of in many opto-electronic, biomedical, and MEMS applications. [9][10][11][12][13] Our study reveals the anodized layer displays some outstanding features such as extremely high intensity of photoluminescence (PL) while the layer thickness is confines within the range of nanometers. Pavesi et al…”