Versatile Mesoporous Nanoparticles for Cell Applications.

Mesoporous silica nanostructures are emerging as a promising platform able to deal with challenges of many different applications in fields such as biomedicine and nanotechnology. The versatile physical and functional properties of these materials like high specific surface area, ordered porosity, chemical stability under temperature and pH variations, and biocompatible performance, offers new approaches to many biomedical applications ranging from drug delivery systems to biosensing, cell applications and tissue engineering. Their morphology, size and textural properties can be easily tailored by means of chemical control, giving rise to a variety of nanostructures with hexagonal (SBA15, MCM41) or cubic (SBA16) arrangement of channels and pore size ranging from 1.