There's a running joke about MOFs in the physical and inorganic chemistry worlds - their only real-world application is producing JACS papers.
Bit of a disappointing prize, but hey, at least it went to chemists this year!
Bit of a disappointing prize, but hey, at least it went to chemists this year!
The shape of the demand is the tricky bit. They're not like many other emerging technologies; they are a whole class of materials with wildly different properties, each of which you can produce in several forms; and production is wildly different depending on the type. If there is demand for X tons/yr, spread across 10 industries, but 90% of that demand is in one industry that requires properties of XYZ, then you need to produce the right MOFs in the right form.
The issue, in my mind, is that a lot of this stuff sort of requires a very large vertically integrated company or government project to kickstart it. You can't go out as a company and say "we want to buy X tons of MIL-53(Sc)" [0], nobody would sell it to you. You also can't go out as a producer and start making X tons of MIL-53(Sc) either. The ideal would be that you are, say, TSMC and it would enhance one of your processes, so you make a few kg in house, you use most of it, you sell the rest, and kickstart an industry in that way.
From my perspective - which, again, take with a heap of salt - I think that academia could do their part by "advertising" the most promising candidates better. The list of MOFs is long and many are not usable or stable in real world conditions. Take some of the more promising candidates out of the lab and do some demos with industry. Put together some videos. Write up some honest reports toward an engineer's point of view. That would provide a real boost towards real-world applications.
[0] I just picked MIL-53(Sc) because it's funny, obviously nobody in the real world is going to use scandium in a production product.
Right now the main issue is that there aren't even really great, cheap ways to mass produce them. Almost everything that's been performed on MOFs has been at the laboratory scale, and there's not necessarily a clear path to scale up. And there are fundamental cost-to-effect ratio issues that can't necessarily be easily overcome.
This therapy could take something like 1-2 hours and could potentially be a drastically more efficient way to administer drugs, because they will primarily affect the target organ/region rather than be necessarily dispersed throughout the whole body, which would result in better intervention outcomes, and less side-effects.