Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Nature embraces the principles of supramolecular chemistry, exploiting noncovalent interactions and coordination chemistry in various ways to facilitate all biological processes. Inspired by nature, the assembly of complex synthetic systems in both solution and the solid state is becoming increasingly feasible. This often requires that known systems be modeled, explored, and fine-tuned in order to develop further systems or biomimics of even higher complexity. In this symposium, we will focus on biomimetic organic and hybrid frameworks that are specifically designed for biological and biomedical applications. Research on metal-organic frameworks, hydrogen-bonded frameworks and covalent organic frameworks has tremendously increased over the past decade. Coordination-based delivery vehicles, which include nanosized extended metal organic frameworks (nMOFs) and discrete coordination cages, have gained a lot of attention because of their remarkable biocompatibility, in-vivo stability, on-demand biodegradability, high encapsulation efficiency, easy surface modification and moderate synthetic conditions. Consequently, these systems have been extensively utilized as carriers of biomacromolecules for biomedical applications. In this symposium, we will focus on the major achievements in this field and the hurdles that we still need to overcome to move closer into pharmaceutical translation. We believe this is a very timely topic and will be of big interest to MRS attendees.

Topics will include:

• Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) for biomedical applications
• Covalent-Organic Frameworks (COFs) for biomedical applications
• Hydrogen- Bonded Organic Frameworks (HOFs) for biomedical applications
• Porous and Coordination Cages
• Biocompatible self-assemblies for encapsulation and delivery

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Jia Min Chin (University of Vienna, AUSTRIA)
• Seth Cohen (University of California, San Diego, USA)
• Paolo Falcaro (Graz University of Technology, Austria)
• Omar Farha (Northwestern University, USA)
• David Farien (University of Cambridge, UK)
• Roberto Fernandez (Basque Center on Materials, Applications and Nanostructures, Spain)
• Jeremiah Gassensmith (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
• Nathan Gianneschi (Northwestern University, USA)
• Mónica Giménez-Marqués (Universitat de València, Spain)
• Jennifer Hiscock (University of Kent, United Kingdom)
• Patricia Hocajada (IMDEA, Spain)
• Hao Li (University of California, Riverside, USA)
• Shengqian Ma (University of North Texas, USA)
• Chinedum Osuji (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Gangfeng Ouyang (Sun Yat-Sen University, China)
• Zachariah Page (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
• Joe Patterson (University of California, Irvine, USA)
• Orlando Rojas (The University of British Columbia, Canada)
• Christian Serre (Ecole Normale Supérieure, France)
• Fa-Kuen Shieh (National Central University, Taiwan)
• Clemence Sicard (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France)
• Ronald Smaldone (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
• Ali Trabolsi (New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
• Ying-Wei Yang (Jilin University, China)
• Wei Zhang (University of Surrey, United Kingdom)

Symposium Organizers