In recent years, mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) have aroused a great deal of attention in drug delivery, owing to the advantages of large specific surface area, controllable size and shape, easily modified surface, large cargo loading capacity,
etc. A great number of drugs have been used to load into MSNs, such as iodomethane (IMC), ibuprofen (IBU), doxorubicin hydrochloride (Dox), paclitaxel, gemcitabine, leading to a high oral bioavailability [
1-
4]. It is not very difficult to synthesize MSNs from different templates and study on drug delivery efficiency. Generally, tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS) based sol-gel process was mostly applied to fabricate MSNs, including hard template and soft template methods. Anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) template is a commonly used hard template, which provides varieties of pore structure and morphology [
5]. AAO template was applied to prepare orderly assembled organic molecules for improving Raman scattering. Of the soft templates, surfactant has a long history of preparing MSNs. Cationic surfactant cetyltrimethylam-monium bromide (CTAB) not only can stabilize colloidal system, but also be easily removed by washing. Pluronic F127, F123, pluronic poly(ethylene oxide)-poly(propylene oxide)-poly(ethyl-ene oxide) (PEO-PPO-PEO) oligomer,
etc. were also favorable for fabrication [
6,
7]. Template-assisted fabrication, especially com-bined with self-assembled process, provides an alternative choice for producing porous nanoparticles in more economical and convenient ways [
8]. In comparison of traditional approach, biomimetic synthesis of MSNs is essential and widely exists in nature, which is actively catalyzed the condensation of TEOS by amines [
9]. It is reported that using chiral surfactant N-palmityl-L-alanine (N-PLA) as template can successfully prepared chiral MSNs and a series of factors on preparation were studied [
10]. Nanoflakes with perpendicular pore channels and nanoworms with horizontal pore channels were prepared using surfactants with amines L-18Ala6PyBr and L-18Ala11PyBr, respectively [
11]. C16-L-tryptophan, C16-L-proline and C16-L-histidine were also applied to synthesize MSNs with different morphology in a biomimetic approach [
9]. Amines are crucial for the bioformation of mesoporous structure, while aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) is always modified on the surface of MSNs with a non-negatively affected drug loading capacity. Additionally, introducing amino groups may be useful to adjust surface charge or pH, which can be protonated after entering into tumor environment and is benefit to endocytosis [
12].