Tag Archives: Alexander Wenk

Labeling 5nm gold nanoparticles with gold isotopes (soft core, hard shell)

There’s a lot of talk about using gold nanoparticles (and others) to deliver drugs to specific locations in the body but this research at Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen (Munich, Germany) and the University of Marburg (Marburg, Germany) appears to be the first successful attempt at tracking how this potential delivery system might actually work. From a June 23, 2015 news item on Azonano,

Nanoparticles are the smallest particles capable of reaching virtually all parts of the body. Researchers use various approaches to test ways in which nanoparticles could be used in medicine – for instance, to deliver substances to a specific site in the body such as a tumor.

For this purpose, nanoparticles are generally coated with organic materials because their surface quality plays a key role in determining further targets in the body. If they have a water-repellent shell, nanoparticles are quickly identified by the body’s immune system and eliminated.

How gold particles wander through the body

The team of scientists headed by Dr. Wolfgang Kreyling, who is now an external scientific advisor at the Institute of Epidemiology II within the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, and Prof. Wolfgang Parak from the University of Marburg, succeeded for the first time in tracking the chronological sequence of such particles in an animal model. To this end, they generated tiny 5 nm gold nanoparticles radioactively labeled with a gold isotope*. These were also covered with a polymer shell and tagged with a different radioactive isotope. According to the researchers, this was, technically speaking, a very demanding nanotechnological step.

A June 22, 2015 Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen press release, which originated the news item, provides more detail,

After the subsequent intravenous injection of the particles, however, the team observed how the specially applied polymer shell disintegrated. “Surprisingly, the particulate gold accumulated mainly in the liver,” Dr. Kreyling recalls. “In contrast, the shell molecules reacted in a significantly different manner, distributing themselves throughout the body.” Further analyses conducted by the scientists explained the reason for this: so-called proteolytic enzymes** in certain liver cells appear to separate the particles from their shell. According to the researchers, this effect was hitherto unknown in vivo, since up to now the particle-conjugate had only been tested in cell cultures, where this effect had not been examined sufficiently thoroughly.

“Our results show that even nanoparticle-conjugates*** that appear highly stable can change their properties when deployed in the human body,” Dr. Kreyling notes, evaluating the results. “The study will thus have an influence on future medical applications as well as on the risk evaluation of nanoparticles in consumer products and in science and technology.”

* Isotopes are types of atoms which have different mass numbers but which represent the same element.

** Proteolytic enzymes split protein structures and are used, for example, to nourish or detoxify the body.

*** Conjugates are several types of molecules that are bound in one particle.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

In vivo integrity of polymer-coated gold nanoparticles by Wolfgang G. Kreyling, Abuelmagd M. Abdelmonem, Zulqurnain Ali, Frauke Alves, Marianne Geiser, Nadine Haberl, Raimo Hartmann, Stephanie Hirn, Dorleta Jimenez de Aberasturi, Karsten Kantner, Gülnaz Khadem-Saba, Jose-Maria Montenegro, Joanna Rejman, Teofilo Rojo, Idoia Ruiz de Larramendi, Roser Ufartes, Alexander Wenk, & Wolfgang J. Parak. Nature Nanotechnology (2015) doi:10.1038/nnano.2015.111 Published online 15 June 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.