Eutectic Gallium-Indium (eGaIn) alloy, a liquid at room temperature, has been used in many fields for its ability to dissipate heat and conduct electricity, but one field where it hasn’t been used is in the medical field as a drug carries. In the presence of air liquid eGaIn particles form an oxide skin. This skin can help control the geometry of eGaIn, as well as allowing ligands to bind to the nanoparticles. These ligands can include active targeting groups or cancer fighting ligands. When dealing with cancer cells eGaIn is an impressive transmitter of active targeting groups as it’s oxide skin is removed, there for removing the ligand, under the acidic conditions found in cancer cells. Once the oxide skin has been removed liquid eGaIn core has a low reactivity and can easily be removed from the body. This is good, however if the wrong ligand binds to the oxide skin the eGaIn nanoparticles would ineffective as drug carriers. To be able to tell exactly what is bound to the eGaIn’s oxide skin Fournier-Transform Infared Spectroscopy (FTIR) can be used. As eGaIn itself is an alloy it shouldn’t have any signal in FTIR, so the only signal should be from the oxide bound ligands. The problem is exactly how can we take an FTIR of eGaIn nanoparticles? This project is attempting to coat the eGaIn nanoparticles on pieces of a plastic screens and salt windows, which will the be test using FTIR to try and confirm that the wanted ligand are bound to the eGaIn nanoparticles.

Determining the presence of ligands on eutectic gallium-indium nanoparticles by Fournier-transform infrared spectroscopy

256th National Meeting (2018)

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