Gold nanoparticles gained widespread interest as potential drug and nucleic acid delivery systems due to important advantages such as biocompatibility, density, and special physicochemical, optical and surface properties. AuNps are widely used nowadays in biological applications such as delivery platforms for enzyme inhibitors, nucleic acids, drugs, and for imaging purposes. We generated our own gold nanoplatform by synthesizing gold nanoparticles via Turkevitch method and variants of this method and functionalizing them with specific ligands to generate either drug delivery systems or nucleic acid delivery systems [1-4]. We will present our recent efforts and strategies towards optimization of the nanoparticle synthesis and size tuning, ligand design and synthesis for drugs/nucleic acid and targeting ligands, nanoparticle decoration with ligands and ligand mixture, drug/nucleic acid loading and drug/nucleic acid delivery and the biological effects generated through their use. Special emphasis will be placed on the optimization of methods for small gold nanoparticle synthesis and towards optimizing ligand exchange in order to preserve colloidal stability and maximize both drug loading and targeting. A significant part of the presentation will be dedicated to biological effect and their relationship with the above-mentioned processes and parameters, as well as with ligand structure and external stimuli.

Ligand exchange and cargo loading optimization in several series of size-controlled Turkevich gold nanoparticles for drug and nucleic acid delivery

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