In recent years, zinc oxide (ZnO)-based nanomaterials have attracted a great deal of interest thanks to their outstanding and multifunctional properties. Actually, ZnO can be synthesized in a broad variety of nano-sized morphologies (such as nanowires, nanorods, nanoparticles, and nanoflowers), shows easy preparation routes and facile surface chemical functionalization. Most importantly, ZnO has many intriguing properties, being a semiconductor, piezoelectric, pyroelectric and photoexcitable material, with low chemical stability in acidic environments and interesting antimicrobial and anticancer properties. These aspects fostered a deep investigation of ZnO nanomaterials to design and fabricate smart biocompatible nanotools, which have been successfully applied to a wide plethora of applications in the biomedical field. In such cases, ZnO nanostructures, alone or combined into hybrid or composite systems, represent a powerful tool for the fabrication of new scaffolds for tissue regeneration with improved antimicrobial properties, as well as for drug delivery applications. Moreover, the promising optical and biocompatible properties of ZnO have been successfully combined together, resulting in the co-presence of imaging and therapeutic actions, useful for theranostics applications towards cancer therapy.
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