Specially Coated Gold Nanoparticles Deliver Drugs or Biosensors to a Cell’s Interior
CAMBRIDGE, MA — Cells are very good at protecting their precious contents; as a result, it’s very difficult to penetrate their membrane walls to deliver drugs, nutrients or biosensors without damaging or destroying the cell. One effective way of doing so, discovered in 2008, is to use nanoparticles of pure gold, coated with a thin layer of a special polymer. But nobody knew exactly why this combination worked so well, or how it made it through the cell wall.
Now, researchers at MIT and the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne in Switzerland have figured out how the process works and the limits on the sizes of particles that can be used. Their analysis appears in the journal Nano Letters, in a paper by graduate students Reid Van Lehn, Prabhani Atukorale, Yu-Sang Yang and Randy Carney and professors Alfredo Alexander-Katz, Darrell Irvine and Francesco Stellacci.