Abstract
Nanotechnology offers the possibility of operating on the same scale length at which biological processes occur, allowing to interfere, manipulate or study cellular events in disease or healthy conditions. The development of hybrid nanostructured materials with a high degree of chemical control and complex engineered surface including biological targeting moieties, allows to specifically bind to a single type of molecule for specific detection, signaling or inactivation processes. Magnetite nanostructures with designed composition and properties are the ones that gather most of the designs as theragnostic agents for their versatility, biocompatibility, facile production and good magnetic performance for remote in vitro and in vivo for biomedical applications. Their superparamagnetic behavior below a critical size of 30 nm has allowed the development of magnetic resonance imaging contrast agents or magnetic hyperthermia nanoprobes approved for clinical uses, establishing an inflection point in the field of magnetite based theragnostic agents.
Highlights
Magnetism has been technologically exploited for centuries, well before quantum mechanics helped to unveil the fundamental mechanisms governing the behavior of magnetic materials
The optimization and maturity of chemical synthetic procedures during the last decades has allowed the development of materials with designed properties which are only observable at the nanoscale such as, surface plasmonic resonance, enhanced and specific catalytic activity, size-dependent fluorescence, superparamagnetism [2], quantum tunneling magnetization [3] or enhanced coercivity [4] that, all combined, open the door to highly interesting biomedical and technological applications
Superparamagnetic iron oxides nanoparticles (SPIONs) are witnessing a predominant role in nanomedicine developments relaying on their biocompatibility, unbeatable low cost production, physicochemical performance and versatile chemistry that make them almost universally present as a main components in contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetic hyperthermia sources or drug delivery nanoplatforms [6]
Summary
Magnetism has been technologically exploited for centuries, well before quantum mechanics helped to unveil the fundamental mechanisms governing the behavior of magnetic materials. Besides its good magnetic performance (Curie temperature well above any biomedical application, large values of initial susceptibility and saturation magnetization) and biocompatibility, the availability of facile wet chemistry techniques to produce superparamagnetic (SPM) cores with well controlled size, shape and composition has promoted magnetite to the most relevant position in the field of nanomedicine for biodetection, imaging and therapy It competes with the most well accepted soft organic compounds, like liposomes or nano-emulsions, fully biocompatible, biodegradable with enhanced ability for encapsulating a variety of hydrophilic or lipophilic drugs [8] that have found approval for clinical uses in a variety of applications as vaccines, antifunghical, anesthetics or antibiotics [9]. Cage like structures with sizes in the range from 18 to 500 nm, including virus capsids or ferritins obtained from different animal sources, have been used taking profit from their special characteristics (Fn from Pyrococcus furiosus remains stable above water boiling point) in synthetic procedures, at high reaction temperatures, to produce size controlled magnetite NPs [49,50]
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