Template Synthesis of Tubular Nanostructures for Loading Biologically Active Molecules

The template synthesis is a low cost, simple and versatile nanofabrication method to produce cylindrical/tubular nanostructures with controllable dimensions such as length, diameter and aspect ratio. This method utilizes nanoporous membranes such as anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) or polycarbonate (PC) as templates which have nanosized specific, cylindrical and uniform inner pores to be coated with the desired material. Template synthesized nanotubular structures have been produced from variety of materials including ceramics, polymers and proteins for loading biologically active molecules. Available procedures of material deposition into the template nanopores consist of several techniques like wetting (melt or solution wetting), layer-by-layer (LbL) assembly and sol-gel chemistry. Template synthesis enables not only control of the geometry of the resulting nanostructures but also provides nanovehicles having separated inner and outer surfaces which can be variously functionalized. Tubular nanostructures fabricated by this method have numerous potential applications including delivery of biologically active molecules such as drugs, gene, enzymes and proteins. In this review we aimed to present up-to-date works on the template based synthesis which has greatly facilitated the fabrication of polymer and protein tubular nanostructures, principally. The strategies regarding the synthesis and designing of these promising tubular nanostructures together with recent approaches relevant of drug delivery was also presented.