News Source: School of Materials Science & Engineering

Editor: News Agency of BIT

Translator: Miao Shiyu, News Agency of BIT

Ferritins are spherical iron storage proteins within cells that are composed of a combination of 24 subunits of two types, namely heavy-chain ferritin (HFn) and light-chain ferritin (LFn). Natural ferritin nanocages have unique nanocage structure, excellent safety profile and good biocompatibility. At present, as nanocarriers, they have been widely used in various biomedical fields such as biomolecular imaging, nanomaterial synthesis, disease diagnosis and treatment.

Recently, Professor Liang Minmin of the School of Materials Science & Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), has been invited to publish a review article entitled “Ferritin: A Multifunctional Nanoplatform for Biological Detection, Imaging Diagnosis, and Drug Delivery” in the top international journal Accounts of Chemical Research with an impact factor of 21.661. This review, based on the team's ferritin-related research results, summarizes the major advances in the use of ferritin nanocages in biomedical diagnosis and treatment. The modes and mechanisms of ferritin transport and release of inorganic nanoparticles, small molecule drugs, proteins, and diagnostic molecules are introduced in this paper. In this paper, the application of ferritin in biomedicine is reviewed in detail from biological detection, molecular imaging diagnosis, and drug transport, and the future development of ferritin nanocarriers is discussed.

The above research achievements were supported by the Key Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and the China Youth Promotion Association Fund.