Monday, November 24, 2014

Multifunctional Nanomaterials in Nanomedicine

After a long gap I am writing another post in my blog.  In this post I wish to write about the work I am doing. The viewers should know what the "Nanotechnologist" is upto. Luckily, I have published two research papers this year and I wish to discuss them. I discuss now my first paper in this post and the discussion about the second paper follows this post.

As from my profile, everyone knows that I am doing Ph.D in SASTRA University, Thanjavur, one of the finest institutions for nanotechnology research. I am working on theranostic multifunctional nanomaterials for cancer treatment. In my first paper, I synthesized the multifunctional nanomaterial and tested against cancer cells, retinoblastoma. The paper was published in Journal of Biomaterial science, polymer edition. Due to the journal copy right issues, i can't attach the hard copy of the paper to this post, i am including the reference of the paper at the bottom of this post.

Combating cancer with a single weapon, say chemotherapy, is not sufficient. Physicians suggesting combination therapies such as chemotherapy with radiation treatment. So combination treatments are giving results. The drawback is that giving high doses of chemo and radiation to patient leads to several side effects, like losing hair is the common scene observed in case of radiation treated patients. To improve the patients quality of life with minimal side effects or none, new technologies have to be tested and used.

One such technology is the utilization of nanomaterials in medicine to treat diseases like cancer. Nanomaterials are those confined to the size of nanometer (10-9m). In case of nanomedicine the horizons with respect to length differ slightly. Many nanomaterials tested for medical applications vary from 10 nm to 400 nm approx. The nanomaterials which are usually the delivering vehicles called as carriers (nanocarriers) deliver drug to the target cells. The end goal is that these materials should be used for imaging, and treating of cancer at the same time. The concept of multifunctionality should be imposed into the nanocarrier. 
Multifunctional Nanomaterial

The manuscript entitled "Engineered multifunctional nanomaterials for multimodal imaging of retinoblastoma cells in vitro" studied the imaging of cancer cells using MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging)  and fluorescence. This property helps in tracking the cancer cells non invasively. SPIONs (superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles) with high magnetization and good senstitivity in MRI were synthesized. The nanoparticle surface was modified with oleic acid and again coated with bovine serum albumin and decorated with sulforhodamine B, fluorescent dye. This material showed no toxicity towards healthy cells. The MRI and fluorescence imaging abilites were studied.

The multifunctional nanomaterials are highly useful in imaging the cancer cells in vivo which helps in better diagnosis and progressively better treatment of cancer.

Reference: Leela Raghava Jaidev, Dhiraj Vasanth Bhavsar, Uma Sharma, Naranamanglam R. Jagannathan, Uma Maheswari Krishnan & Swaminathan Sethuraman (2014) Engineered multifunctional nanomaterials for multimodal imaging of retinoblastoma cells in vitro, Journal of Biomaterials Science, Polymer Edition, 25:11, 1093-1109.

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