Nano Express
Barium Titanate Nanoparticles: Highly Cytocompatible Dispersions in Glycol-chitosan and Doxorubicin Complexes for Cancer Therapy
1 Center of MicroBioRobotics c/o Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italian Institute of Technology, Viale Rinaldo Piaggio 34, 56025, Pontedera (Pisa), Italy
2 CUCCS-RRMR, University of Pisa, via Roma 55, 56126, Pisa, Italy
3 Department of Human Morphology and Applied Biology, University of Pisa, Via Roma 55, 56126, Pisa, Italy
4 Department of Oncology and Transplants, University of Pisa, Via Roma 55, 56126, Pisa, Italy
5 Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Viale Rinaldo Piaggio 34, 56025, Pontedera (Pisa), Italy
Nanoscale Research Letters 2010, 5:1093-1101 doi:10.1007/s11671-010-9607-0
Published: 9 May 2010Abstract
In the latest years, innovative nanomaterials have attracted a dramatic and exponentially increasing interest, in particular for their potential applications in the biomedical field. In this paper, we reported our findings on the cytocompatibility of barium titanate nanoparticles (BTNPs), an extremely interesting ceramic material. A rational and systematic study of BTNP cytocompatibility was performed, using a dispersion method based on a non-covalent binding to glycol-chitosan, which demonstrated the optimal cytocompatibility of this nanomaterial even at high concentration (100 μg/ml). Moreover, we showed that the efficiency of doxorubicin, a widely used chemotherapy drug, is highly enhanced following the complexation with BTNPs. Our results suggest that innovative ceramic nanomaterials such as BTNPs can be realistically exploited as alternative cellular nanovectors.
