Liquid Metal Gallium Pharmaceuticals

The room temperature liquid metal gallium, as a multi-targeted pharmacologically active metallic element with long historical investigation, has shown great potential in the field of medicine, especially in antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, osteogenesis, radio-pharmacology, molecular imaging and more emerging drug categories. However, diverse structures and physical/chemical compositions, complex interactions with living organisms, and insufficient mechanism interpretation, pose serious challenges for the clinical translation of gallium-based pharmaceuticals. This review systematically identified and described promising gallium-based pharmaceuticals, with emphasis on typical features, fundamental pharmaceutical activities, representative pharmaceutical formulations, and practical implementations, aiming to inspire innovative concepts for drug discovery and further investigation. Meaningfully, new insights into gallium-based liquid metals for screening pharmaceutical formulations are presented, which promise to bring broader strategies for enhancing the bioavailability, targetability, biocompatibility and pharmacological efficacy of active pharmaceutical ingredients (Ga(0)/Ga(III)). Besides, the unresolved challenges and future perspectives of these emerging gallium-based pharmaceuticals were also outlined, aiming to aid for future academic explorations and translational medicine of gallium-based pharmaceuticals. Overall, gallium-based pharmaceuticals with tremendous pharmaceutical formulations and pharmaceutical activities open up a huge scope great potential for future pharmaceutical engineering, which are promising to usher epochal metallodrug development with a series of breakthrough discoveries and pioneering technologies.