Abstract
Gold nanorods (AuNRs) can combine therapeutic hyperthermia with diagnostic features, representing a smart choice to address personalized cancer treatments. In this regard, a crucial quest is the selection of the right biocompatible coating agent able to stabilize them in the physiological environment, further endowing the possibility to load bioactive molecules and/or targeting moieties. Therefore, AuNRs optical properties can be successfully merged with advantageous materials features to obtain selective photothermal therapy (PTT) systems. Here, the natural materials lipoic acid (LA) and the polysaccharide gellan gum (GG) were chosen to prepare three types of stabilized gold nanorods, using LA (AuNRs/LA), a layered coating of LA and GG (AuNRs/LA,GG) or a newly synthesized covalent derivative of LA and GG (AuNRs/GG-LA). The samples displayed diverse stability and dispersibility. Hydrodynamic diameters and surface potential analyses confirmed the nanometric size (100–200 nm) and showed surface charges ranging from +19.5 to −25.6 mV. Particular attention was thus paid to analyze the differences between hyperthermia properties exhibited after near-infrared (NIR) laser irradiation. Furthermore, the cytocompatibility and photothermal effect were tested on HCT116 human colon cancer cell line. Collected data have finally allowed selecting AuNRs/LA,GG as the best candidate for possible use in PTT of cancer.
Highlights
Nanomaterials science constantly provides new approaches to overcome the limitations that lie in disparate fields of current technology
In order to obtain a comparison between the physicochemical properties and the hyperthermia efficacy of gold nanorods stabilized by different coating agents, the ester derivative GG-lipoic acid (LA) was first synthesized starting from the sodium salt of the natural polysaccharide gellan gum (GG; 50 KDa)
It is possible to note that both aqueous dispersions containing unmodified GG as well as derivatized GG, exhibit excellent stability after freeze-drying. These findings indicate that the presence of gellan gum can act as a cryoprotective agent of the proposed nanostructures
Summary
Nanomaterials science constantly provides new approaches to overcome the limitations that lie in disparate fields of current technology. There has been recently registered an expanding production of new nanometric devices that cover a wide panorama of biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery, biosensing, and bioimaging [1,2,3]. In this scenario, a clear breakthrough has been achieved exploiting inorganic nanostructures, which endow to synergistically combine the advantageous dimensional characteristics of nanomaterials with their unique features including hyperthermia, conductivity, magnetism, and contrast properties [4,5]. Diverse nanometric inorganic materials, such as superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) [6,7], graphene oxide [8,9], silica nanoparticles [10,11], quantum dots [12,13], colloidal gold [14,15], have been already successfully employed for drug delivery or theranostic purposes.
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