Bioactive glasses (BGs) have been widely developed as promising synthetic biomaterials for bone tissue engineering (BTE) applications. In recent years mesoporous bioactive glasses (MBGs) have been receiving increasing attention due to the presence of mesoporous structures (tunable pore sizes), which enable their use as drug delivery carriers to achieve controlled drug release in a variety of biomedical applications. In this context, highly dispersed SiO2-CaO based MBGs were synthesized using a microemulsion-assisted sol-gel process. MBGs were also doped with different concentrations of manganese (Mn). Brunauer Emmett Teller (BET) results revealed that MBGs (both doped and undoped) exhibited high surface area (309-444 m2/g) and mesoporosity (characterized by TEM), which are valuable features for the loading of therapeutic biomolecules for drug delivery applications. Furthermore, two natural herb-derived therapeutic agents, namely icariin and silibinin, were used as natural drugs and loaded into prepared MBGs to impart additional biofunctionality. The physiochemical, structural, compositional, loading efficiency and cellular properties of loaded MBGNs were investigated. Cell viability assay (WST-8) revealed that icariin exhibits a dose-dependent cytocompatibility against the MG-63 cell line. Silibinin was also released in a sustained manner, which is required for treating neoplastic pathologies. The initial results suggest that silibinin has chemotherapeutic potential toward metastasized cancer cells. The present research opens different research avenues for the application of ion-doped MBGs in the context of bone tissue engineering and controlled drug delivery.