Abstract Inorganic nanocarriers are potent candidates for delivering conventional anticancer drugs, nucleic acid-based therapeutics, and imaging agents, influencing their blood half-lives, tumor targetability, bioactivity. In addition to the high surface area-to-volume ratio, they exhibit excellent scalability in synthesis, controllable shape size, facile modification, inertness, stability, uni...

•Twisted rectangular subcomponents self-assemble into a large tetrahedral architecture•Each triangular face of the tetrahedron is composed three ligand units•A smaller M8L6 cubic assembly forms as an isolable kinetic intermediate•The host binds multiple equivalents dianionic guest Molecular capsules can catalyze reactions, perform chiral separations, and stabilize reactive molecules. Many molec...