Abstract
Cell death is crucial to human health and is related to various serious diseases. Therefore, generation of new cell death regulators is urgently needed for disease treatment. Nanoparticles (NPs) are now routinely used in a variety of fields, including consumer products and medicine. Exhibiting stability and ease of decoration, gold nanoparticles (GNPs) could be used in diagnosis and disease treatment. Upon entering the human body, GNPs contact human cells in the blood, targeting organs and the immune system. This property results in the disturbance of cell function and even cell death. Therefore, GNPs may act as powerful cell death regulators. However, at present, we are far from establishing a structure–activity relationship between the physicochemical properties of GNPs and cell death, and predicting GNP-induced cell death. In this review, GNPs’ size, shape, and surface properties are observed to play key roles in regulating various cell death modalities and related signaling pathways. These results could guide the design of GNPs for nanomedicine.
Highlights
Apoptosis, autophagy, necroptosis, aponecrosis, pyroptosis, and necrosis are major cell death modalities [1,2,3,4,5]
We summarized how gold nanoparticles (GNPs) properties affect cell death, and the potential use in disease treatment, primarily focusing on apoptosis, necrosis, autophagy, and associated molecular mechanisms
While cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB)-gold nanorods (GNRs) with different aspect ratios (1, 2, 3, and 4) showed similar abilities to induce autophagy, surface modification of CTAB-GNRs with polystyrene sulfonate, poly allylamine hydrochloride, or both, dramatically decreased their autophagy induction abilities. These findings suggested that surface chemistry, but not aspect ratios, played a key role in determining the autophagy induction ability of GNRs
Summary
Autophagy, necroptosis, aponecrosis, pyroptosis, and necrosis are major cell death modalities [1,2,3,4,5]. Cell death plays an important role in maintaining human health, and is associated with various diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases, ischemic damage, autoimmune disorders, cancer [9,10,11,12,13,14], aging [15], type 2 diabetes [16], and atherosclerosis [17,18]. Because GNPs could act as cell death regulators, they may synergistically treat diseases along with loaded drugs and external stimuli. We summarized how GNP properties affect cell death, and the potential use in disease treatment, primarily focusing on apoptosis, necrosis, autophagy, and associated molecular mechanisms
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