ABSTRACT
Nanoporous materials is a fast-growing subset of nanomaterials with unique intrinsic properties. The advances in fabrication and characterization techniques have enabled scientists to tailor the properties and design a wide range of application specific nanoporous materials. This chapter highlights the key technological advancements that nanoporous materials have achieved in the frontiers of biomedical engineering across analyses, diagnostics and therapeutics. It draws attention to progressive studies like the membrane based organ-on-a-chip (OOC) models of the blood brain barrier and human alveolar that contributed to the advancements in the drug development studies of neurological diseases and COVID-19 to neurochemical biosensing and artificial portable kidneys (Fan et al., ACS Nano 13:8374–8381, 2019;Wang et al., Biotechnol. Bioeng. 114:184–194, 2017;Zhang et al., Adv. Sci. 8:1–14, 2021;Zhou et al., Anal. Chem. 91:3645–3651, 2019). A brief account of the versatile industrial applications of nanoporous materials in chromatography, nanoreactors, energy storage and cutting-edge concepts like nanosized photonic data storage is also illustrated with representative cases. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.