ALB and neoplasm: Inspired by this approach, we and other groups recently demonstrated that albumin and other proteins could be applied as a nanoreactor to allow the growth of theranostic inorganic nanocrystals such as tellurium (Yang et al., 2017), gadolinium oxide (Zhou et al., 2017; Lv et al., 2018), copper sulfide (Yang et al., 2016), manganese oxide (Li et al., 2022; Zhai et al., 2022) inside albumin or transferrin nanocage via precipitation reaction or redox reaction, exhibiting superior tumor targeting ability and high drug loading efficiency.