Nanomaterials are becoming ubiquitous in consumer products due to their unique properties that make them applicable to different fields, ranging from electronics to food packaging and sun creams. This has led to an increasing number of studies on the interactions of nanomaterials with biological systems, including, but not limited to, biological fluids, cells and in vivo models in order to determine the possible effects these materials may have. While the studies reported until now have shown that nanomaterials usually enter the cell through energy-dependent processes and are ultimately trafficked to an acidic organelle known as the lysosome, there is still little knowledge about the changes that the structure of the nanoparticle might undergo inside the lysosomal environment, especially over long-term conditions. Therefore in this project, a platform was developed to allow long-term cell culture of A549 cells. Also, a method to recover nanoparticles from the intracellular space was validated for different nanomaterials. These techniques showed promising results when applied to nanomaterials, allowing the study of nanoparticles behaviour in long-term and the characterization of the possible modification of the structure of the nanoparticles once they interacted with the lysosomes over long-term conditions i.e. form 1 week to 1 month. In this work different nanoparticles have been used, Silica nanoparticles have been considered non-toxic, biocompatible and biodegradable, therefore we applied them to our platform in order to confirm the possible biodegradation of these materials. Also, gold core nanoparticles with a silica coated shell (Au SiO2) and magnetite core nanoparticles with a silica coated shell (Fe3O4 SiO2) were used to evaluate their intracellular stability and highlight their possible degradation over a longer period in vitro. Finally, cerium oxide (CeO2) nanoparticles have been used as a validation of our approach as it is known these particles are stable and not degradable in vitro studies whereas recent in vivo studies have shown that over longer time scales ceria nanoparticles do degrade.

Understanding the long-term fate of nanoparticles using a novel 3D system in vitro

256th National Meeting (2018)

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