Monitoring the Hemolytic Effect of Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles after Human Blood Protein Corona Formation

Abstract

AbstractThe interaction of promising nanoparticles with red blood cells (RBCs) is a critical point to be addressed in nanomedicine and nanotoxicology, and the hemolytic assay is a classical and common test used to evaluate such interactions and the consequent nanoparticle toxicity. In addition, the protein corona is an emergent concept in bionanoscience associated with the manifestation of energetically driven protein–nanoparticle interactions, with a great impact on the nanomaterial toxicity assessment. In the convergence of these two concepts, we evaluated the influence of the formation of the protein corona during the hemolysis induced by spherical mesoporous silica nanoparticles with silanol groups on the external surface (MSN‐SiOH), which present a confirmed toxicity on RBCs when they are dispersed as a colloid in phosphate buffer saline solution (PBS). It was observed that human blood proteins such as human serum albumin (HSA), human plasma (HP), hemoglobin (Hb), and RBC lysate, termed hemolysate (HL), can suppress the hemolytic effect induced by MSN‐SiOH in a dose‐dependent manner. The EC50 values of hemolysis suppression were 24, 8.0, 19, and 28 μg mL–1 for HSA, HP, Hb, and HL, respectively. This work thus shows that the results of the hemolytic assay that defines the toxicity and bioreactivity of silica nanoparticles (and others) must be interpreted as a function of the formation of the protein corona.