Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly ordered hybrid organic-inorganic materials with properties such as defined crystallinity, permanent porosity and high surface area. By carefully selecting the building blocks in a MOF, i.e. the metal cluster and the organic linker, it is possible to tailor the specific properties of these materials.<br/>Lanthanide based MOFs have interesting properties due to the nature of the metal node. Lanthanide ions have high coordination numbers and diverse coordination geometries, making it difficult to prepare porous materials. By binding solvent molecules to these ions, along with the organic linker, nonporous extended 3D structures are formed. The removal of the solvent molecules can lead to the formation of microporous framework materials with accessible free metal sites. The presence of accessible coordinatively unsaturated lanthanides in the framework which can act as Lewis acid sites, imparts the MOFs with properties suitable for diverse applications such as drug delivery, photoluminescence, chemical sensing, heterogenous catalysis and gas adsorption.<br/>The research to be presented focuses on the synthesis and characterization of Holmium based MOFs (Ho-MOFs) and their applications. The crystal structures of three novel Ho-MOFs based on rigid linkers will be described (example on attached image). Since free sites can selectively bind specific gases, we can develop membranes with enhanced gas separation properties. Alternatively, the abundant Holmium-165 can be neutron activated into radioisotope Holmium-166. This isotope has applications in radiotherapy and imaging due to its short half-life of 26.8 hours. Recent results for gas separations and cancer treatments will be discussed.

Holmium-based metal-organic framework for gas separations and cancer therapy

255th National Meeting (2018)

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