Irradiation stability and cytotoxicity of gold nanoparticles for radiotherapy

Abstract

Xiao-Dong Zhang1, Mei-Li Guo2, Hong-Ying Wu1, Yuan-Ming Sun1, Yan-Qiu Ding1, Xin Feng1, Liang-An Zhang11Institute of Radiation Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Physics, Tianjin Institute of Urban Construction, Tianjin, People’s Republic of ChinaAbstract: Gold nanoparticles are promising as a kind of novel radiosensitizer in radiotherapy. If gold nanoparticles are shown to have good irradiation stability and biocompatibility, they would play an important role in radiotherapy. In this work, we investigated irradiation effects of gold nanoparticles under 2–10 kR gamma irradiation and cytotoxicity of gold nanoparticles with human K562 cells by using Cell Titre-Glo™ luminescent cell viability assay. The results revealed that gamma irradiation had not induced any obvious instability and size variations in gold nanoparticles. We found that gold nanoparticles showed excellent radiation hardness with an absorbed dose conversation factor of 9.491 rad/R. Meanwhile, the surface plasmon resonance of gold nanoparticles was enhanced obviously after 2–10 kR gamma irradiation. Subsequently, cytotoxicity tests indicated that the extremely high concentration of gold nanoparticles could cause a sharp decrease in K562 cell viability, while the low concentration of gold nanoparticles had no obvious influence on the cell viability. Our results revealed that gold nanoparticles were stable under high-energy ray irradiation and showed concentration-dependent cytotoxicity.Keywords: gold nanoparticles, gamma ray effects, colloids, cytotoxicity