Drug-delivery and biological activity in colorectal cancer of a supramolecular porous material assembled from heptameric chromium-copper-adenine entities.

The therapeutic application of drugs often faces challenges due to non-specific distribution, inadequate dosification and degradation, which limits their efficacy. Two primary strategies are employed to overcome these issues: the use of derivatives of the active substances and incorporation of those into porous materials. The latter, involving materials such as zeolites, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and hydrogels, has shown promising results in protecting the active ingredients from degradation and enabling a controlled release. This study focuses on supramolecular metal-organic frameworks (SMOFs), which leverage supramolecular interactions for enhanced pore size control. CuCr(μ-adeninato-κ3:κ9)(μ-OH)(μ-OH)·HO (Cu6Cr) was chosen for its flexible porous structure, water-stability, and paramagnetic properties. Magnetic sustentation studies showed that this compound was able to capture several drug molecules: 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), 5-aminosalicylic acid (5-ASA), 4-aminosalicylic acid (4-ASA) and theophylline (THEO). Their release follows a pseudo-first-order kinetics with desorption half-lives ranging from 2.2 to 4.7 hours. In this sense, a novel approach is proposed using bulkier raffinose and cholesterol as pore-blocking molecules. Cholesterol exhibited the best performance as a blocking molecule increasing the desorption half-life up to 8.2 hours. Cytotoxicity and RNA-seq transcriptomic assays carried out on human colorectal cancer cell cultures showed, on one hand, that the Cu6Cr porous material exhibits a proliferative effect, probably coming from the over-expression of MIR1248 and SUMO2 genes, and on the other hand, that there is a delay in the emergence of the cytotoxicity of 5-FU as expected for a slower release.