Enhanced Penetration of Human Placental Tissue by SiO$_{2}$ Nanoparticles as a Result of Microneedle and Electroporation Treatments

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the penetration and accumulation of SiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) in vitro human placental tissue as a function of NP size and electroporation (EP) and microneedle (MN) treatments. The results show that the penetration and accumulation of SiO2 NPs has a significant influence on the optical properties. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) monitoring and diffuse reflectance (DR) spectra measurements indicate that 30 nm SiO2 NPs have a tendency to generate greater signal intensities, while 15 nm NPs penetrated faster and had a higher penetration depth. The reduction in average attenuation coefficients of human placental tissue when the SiO2 NPs size is constant is found to show the following trend: SiO2 NPs in combination with EP and MN treatment > SiO2 NPs in combination with MN > SiO2 NPs with EP > only SiO2 NPs. It can be concluded that EP and MN treatments dramatically increase the penetration of SiO2 NPs into human placental tissue. The results prove that OCT and DR spectra can be combined with EP and MN treatments to establish a theoretical basis for the safe use of SiO2 NPs on human placental tissue and can potentially become a powerful tool for early diagnosis and monitoring of tissue diseases.

Keywords

• {2} nanoparticle%22%2C%22default_operator%22%3A%22AND%22%7D%7D%7D"> SiO<sub xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">{2}</sub> nanoparticle
• human placenta tissue
• microneedle
• electroporation
• optical coherence tomography
• diffuse reflectance spectra.