Dr. Tabish discusses controlling gold nanoparticle toxicity levels in live cells.
This week, Dr. Tanveer Tabish joined around three thousand scientists at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, USA, for the 17th Material Science & Technology (MS&T19) technical meeting.
Tanveer chaired a session dedicated to the next generation of biomaterials, in which he gave an invited talk outlining our progress in characterising the toxicity of different shapes, sizes, charges and concentrations of gold nanoparticles in breast cancer cells.
This work is crucial to the success of the RaNT programme. It will help us design signal boosting, heat generating gold nanostructures that are totally biocompatible, and can be used safely within the body throughout the diagnosis and treatment stages of the RaNT procedure.
Read Tanveer's Conference Abstract
Gold nanostructures as cancer theranostic probes: a positive rescue for negative margins
Authors: Tanveer A. Tabish, Priyanka Dey, Sara Mosca, Pascaline Bouzy, Francesca Palombo, Pavel Matousek & Nick Stone
Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) offer a wide spectrum of biomedical utilities such as imaging, sensing, drug delivery and light-mediated therapy since the structure, molecular weight, size-dependent plasmon resonance features and chemical composition, as well as bioconjugation/functionalization, can be precisely controlled. However, studies on the toxicity of AuNPs and on their shape-dependent effects on breast cancer cells are scarce. Therefore, AuNPs-membrane interactions need to be explored at the molecular level to help better understand the underlying physiochemical mechanisms for potential applications in cancer nanomedicine. The size, shape, chemical composition, aqueous solubility and surface chemistry of AuNPs all affect their interactions with biological systems.
This talk will provide an overview of our recent developments on the design of gold nanostructures to interface with cells for cancer diagnosis and treatment in a safe and targeted single procedure. We have demonstrated the toxic potential of commercially available different sized and shaped bare AuNPs with spherical (~ 10, 60 and 100 nm) and nanorods (~ 10, 50 and 100) morphologies towards two breast cancer cells (MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7). It was shown that the cell viability, cell proliferation and programmed cell death can be affected by the shape, size and concentration surface functionality and charge of AuNPs. Gold nanorods are proved to be more toxic than nanospheres and are capable of efficiently inducing apoptosis in cancer cells under the dark environment. This may be attributed to their sharp edges, large size and aggregation process. We propose that the toxic potential of AuNPs is primarily dependent on their diameter and secondarily on their shape.
This talk will also describe how variations in the size and shape of AuNPs may indicate particular nanoparticle morphologies that provide strong cytotoxicity effects with innovative synthesis strategies, structures and properties, enabling first-in-field multimodal imaging and therapeutic options.
