Abstract
Acceptability and relevance of nanoparticles in the society is greatly improved using a safer-by-design strategy. However, this is difficult to implement when too late in the development process or when nanoparticles are already on the market (e.g., TiO2). We employ this strategy for emerging nanoparticles of lanthanide oxysulfide of formula (Gd,Ce)2O2S, relevant for photocatalysis as well as for multimodal imaging, as the bandgap of the nanoparticles, related to their Ce content, impacts their ability to absorb visible light. As a first step, we investigated the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) as a function of cerium content, in abiotic conditions and in vitro using murine macrophage RAW 264.7 cell line. We demonstrate that, at sub-lethal doses, Ce-containing oxysulfide nanoparticles are responsible for a higher ROS intracellular formation than cerium-free Gd2O2S nanoparticles, although no significant inflammatory response or oxidative stress was measured. Moreover, there was no significant loss of cerium as free cation from the nanoparticles, as evidenced by X-ray fluorescence mapping. Based on these results, we propose a risk analysis for lanthanide oxysulfide nanoparticles, leading to a technology assessment that fulfills the safer-by-design strategy.
Highlights
Nanomaterials present fascinating properties that have made them highly attractive for novel marketable products or nanotechnology development as well as innovative academic research project
The safer-by-design approach attempts at performing alongside the development of the nanoparticle’s qualities, varying for instance their composition or their surface coverage, and the assessment of each of these parameters on their safe use. We employed this process on an emerging family of materials, the lanthanide oxysulfides, scarcely studied and not yet manufactured
We focused on one quality: the bandgap, which is tuned by the addition of cerium in the compound and is critical to a range of future applications such as photocatalysis or in the fields of semi-conductors
Summary
Nanomaterials present fascinating properties that have made them highly attractive for novel marketable products or nanotechnology development as well as innovative academic research project. Despite the bright outlooks for the future of nanotechnology, nanomaterials carry potential risks towards environment and human health; the toxicity of nanomaterials can be higher than their chemically identical bulk counterpart, which limits the potential for innovation in both industry and research [2,3,4]. Due to their small size, nanoparticles are chemically more reactive, but they may enter inside the cells and cause irreparable damage precluded from larger particles [5]. Several examples are available, such as pulmonary inflammation due to nanoscale TiO2 particles [3,6,7] and genotoxicity from Ag, ZnO [2,4,8,9]
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