The chemotherapy drug cisplatin is used to treat a wide variety of cancers; however, it has a number of side effects, such as damage to hearing or balance functions of the ear defined as ototoxicity. The ototoxic effect of cisplatin has recently been shown to depend on entry into inner ear hair cells through the mechanotransduction channel, and we hypothesized that conjugation of the drug to gold nanoparticles (AuNP) larger than the diameter of the channel would reduce ototoxicity. Such drug-nanoparticles conjugates have been shown by others to effectively delivery the drug to tumor via the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect. The goal of this study was to use larval zebrafish as an in vivo model to investigate whether conjugation to gold nanoparticles reduces cisplatin's ototoxicity. Gold nanoparticles were synthesized and linked to cisplatin via mercaptoundecanoic acid. The loading of cisplatin on the nanoparticles was measured by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy. The ototoxic effect of the AuNP-cisplatin conjugates was tested in zebrafish larva and compared to unconjgated cisplatin. This poster will summarize the results of these experiments.

Investigating the ototoxicity of gold nanoparticle conjugated cisplatin

248th National Meeting (2014)

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