Curvature Assisted Fabrication of Mesoporous Carbon Spheres with Controlled Pore Structures as Intelligent Nano-Medicine

The pore structure is critical for mesoporous materials, which is related with the structural characteristics such as pore size, specific surface area, and open-framework properties. These properties can influence their performances in various applications such as pollutants adsorption, energy storage, cellular delivery and controlled drug release. However, a great challenge remains in the surfactant-free synthetic approach to realize the control over the pore structure characteristic in mesoporous materials. Herein, we report a reaction kinetic controlled surfactant-free synthesis approach to control the porous nature of mesoporous carbon spheres (MCSs) through modulating the condensation kinetics of two polymerization systems. The self-assembly process can regulate the porous nature of MCSs from orderless central radial pore channels to relative ordered of cylindrical arranged mesopores. Moreover, the derived MCSs are demonstrated as delivery vectors and it is shown that the pore structure characteristics have a significant impact on the near-infrared (NIR, 750-1500 nm) light stimulated release of the loaded cargo molecules. This work provides not only new synthetic method to modulate pore structure characteristics of MCSs, but also uniform MCSs as novel delivery platforms with advanced controlled release performance