Abstract
The application of nanoscience and nanotechnology in medicine has been useful in the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of many diseases. Gold nanoparticles are commonly used for medical imaging studies, biosensors, drug delivery systems, and gene therapy. It has been reported that nanoparticles coated with specific polymers improve the biocompatibility and stability and decrease the cytotoxicity of the nanoparticles. In this work, we performed transfection studies of gold nanoparticles coated with polyethylene glycol, synthetized by two different methods, in a human embryonic kidney cell culture (HEK 293), by using plasmids pSV-β-Gal and pIRES2-EGFP. In addition, we also evaluated the cell uptake of a fluorescent drug (atorvastatin) using the synthetized gold nanoparticles as carriers. Furthermore, the study of cell viability after the interaction between these cells and the nanoparticles was performed. It was shown that the polyethylene glycol-coated gold nanoparticles presented transfection efficiency and cell uptake greater than 45% in each case. These results suggest that the synthetized gold nanoparticles coated with polyethylene glycol could be used successfully and safely as DNA and drug delivery systems.
Highlights
Nanomedicine is a field that has great interest in the scientific community [1], since it has found application in many areas of science such as medical imaging [2], tumor targeting [3], drug delivery [4, 5], and biosensors [6], among others
It is necessary to find coatings which improve the stability of the colloids at different environments; in this case, it was showed that SHPEG-NH2 (2 KDa) coating on gold nanoparticles could be useful for this purpose
The obtained transfection efficiency of these plasmids by using AuNP-polyethylene glycol (PEG) is higher than the efficiency obtained from many methods used for gene therapy; this shows that the gold nanoparticles coated with PEG could be considered promising DNA vehicles for many medical proposes, for instance, cancer therapy
Summary
Nanomedicine is a field that has great interest in the scientific community [1], since it has found application in many areas of science such as medical imaging [2], tumor targeting [3], drug delivery [4, 5], and biosensors [6], among others. Nanoparticles have been widely studied for medical purposes; the main problem consists in finding the materials with optimal biocompatibility [7]. It has been found that gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are one of the most innocuous nanoparticles for living organisms [8], and it is suspected that most of the nanoparticles enter into the cells by endocytosis [9]. The cytotoxicity of most of AuNPs depends on several parameters such as size, tissue distribution, penetration capacity, tissue absorption, and cell types [10]. Gold nanoparticles with sizes of 18 and 20 nm show greater cell viability in some kinds of cell cultures [11]
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