*Drug Delivery Applications of Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.103684*

anti-cancer drugs, based on both *in vitro* and *in vivo* experiments. In 2006, Horcajada et al. were the first ones to report the ability of MOFs to act as efficient drug delivery agents. They prepared two mesoporous cubic MOFs, namely MIL-100 and MIL-101. They employed them to adsorb ibuprofen, a commonly used anti-inflammatory drug and found that MIL-101 with a larger cage size was able to adsorb more amount of drug (1.4 g/g of MOF) [30]. Nasrabadi et al. reported the use of UiO-66 NMOF with surface area 1196 m2 /g to post-synthetically load ciprofloxacin (CIP), an antibiotic. The resulting CIP-UiO-66 NMOF showed a very high drug loading percentage of about 84%, with significant antibacterial activity against *Escherichia coli* (Gramnegative) and *Staphylococcus aureus* (Gram-positive) bacteria in comparison to free CIP [52]. ZIF-8 is a pH-responsive MOF, which disintegrates in an acidic environment, and thus is a promising drug carrier especially for anti-cancer applications because of acidic nature of tumor micro-environment. Sun et al. for the first time reported the use of ZIF-8 for the controlled and pH-triggered release of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), an anticancer drug with high loading capacity (660 mg/g of MOF) [53]. **Table 1** summarizes some of the NMOFs and MOFs reported for the delivery of therapeutic agents.
