alt Hacker NewsThere's a running joke about MOFs in the physical and inorganic chemistry worlds - their only real-world application is producing JACS papers.
Bit of a disappointing prize, but hey, at least it went to chemists this year!
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What if down the line we discover that MOFs can be used for sophisticated drug delivery? Imagine a therapy like this: a patient lies on a magnetic table, and is administered a dose of MOFs containing a specific drug, via bloodstream injection. The metal of choice is the MOF is magnetic. The magnetic table slowly guides the MOFs towards the part of the body that requires the drug, keeping them concentrated there for some period of time while the drug if absorbed by the body. If it is then necessary/ideal to remove the MOFs, the procedure can be performed in reverse. The patient's blood is drawn, and the MOFs are guided to the site of the injection. An external appartus filters the MOFs out of the blood, and returns the filtered blood to the patient (to minimize blood loss).
This therapy could take something like 1-2 hours and could potentially be a drastically more efficient way to administer drugs, because they will primarily affect the target organ/region rather than be necessarily dispersed throughout the whole body, which would result in better intervention outcomes, and less side-effects.
My only connection to the field is that I am a guy who uses zeolites in a redneck way - so take this with a huge heap of salt - but I think this is a three part chicken and egg problem. People don't use MOFs because they're expensive, they're expensive because they're not mass-produced, and they're not mass produced because the shape of the demand is uncertain.
The shape of the demand is the tricky bit. They're not like many other emerging technologies; they are a whole class of materials with wildly different properties, each of which you can produce in several forms; and production is wildly different depending on the type. If there is demand for X tons/yr, spread across 10 industries, but 90% of that demand is in one industry that requires properties of XYZ, then you need to produce the right MOFs in the right form.
The issue, in my mind, is that a lot of this stuff sort of requires a very large vertically integrated company or government project to kickstart it. You can't go out as a company and say "we want to buy X tons of MIL-53(Sc)" [0], nobody would sell it to you. You also can't go out as a producer and start making X tons of MIL-53(Sc) either. The ideal would be that you are, say, TSMC and it would enhance one of your processes, so you make a few kg in house, you use most of it, you sell the rest, and kickstart an industry in that way.
From my perspective - which, again, take with a heap of salt - I think that academia could do their part by "advertising" the most promising candidates better. The list of MOFs is long and many are not usable or stable in real world conditions. Take some of the more promising candidates out of the lab and do some demos with industry. Put together some videos. Write up some honest reports toward an engineer's point of view. That would provide a real boost towards real-world applications.
[0] I just picked MIL-53(Sc) because it's funny, obviously nobody in the real world is going to use scandium in a production product.