%0 Journal Article
%T Nanomedicine 2017: Inorganic coating of luminescent porous silicon for nanomedicine applications
%A Nicola Daldosso
%J Open Journal of Immunology
%D 2020
%X Porous silicon (pSi) is a photo-luminescent material produced by electrochemical etching of crystalline silicon wafer. It is suitable for nanomedicine applications, because it is inert, biodegradable, bio-compatible and have no immune response. Furthermore, their optical properties, due to quantum confinement effect, are very interesting in perspective of bio-imaging applications. One of the main issues for the exploitation of the pSi micro-particles in nano-medicine is the fast quenching of the optical properties in aqueous environment. We previously demonstrated long-term optical stability by covalent attachment of polymers such as chitosan and PEG. In this work, we studied the optical properties stabilization of the micro-particles in a biological buffer (e.g., PBS) by depositing an inorganic TiO2 layer by ALD (atomic layer deposition) in a rotary reactor. This process allows the deposition of a uniform layer with a fine tuned thickness. By optimizing the ALD parameters, we stabilized the optical properties of pSi micro-particles for more than three months (up to now). We investigated the effect of pSi-TiO2 micro-particles on human dendritic cells (DCs) by in-vitro tests, finding no reduction of the DCs viability, but, in view of nanomedicine applications, their ability to increase the immune cell activation by other agonists has to be considered. These results and their proved photoluminescence stability in aqueous solutions gave the chance to pSi-TiO2 micro-particles to be a promising candidate for nanomedicine applications.

Nanomaterials that will circulate in the body have great potential for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. For such applications, it is important that nanomaterials are safely eliminated from the body within a reasonable period of time after they perform their diagnostic or therapeutic functions. Despite efforts to increase their targeting efficiency, the mononuclear phagocytic system cleans significant amounts of systemically introduced nanomaterials before finding their targets, which increases the likelihood of unintentional acute or chronic toxicityHowever, there has been little effort to design the self-destruction of wandering nanoparticles in non-toxic and systemically eliminated products. Here, we present luminescent porous silicon nanoparticles (LPSiNPs) that will carry a payload of drugs and whose intrinsic near-infrared photoluminescence allows monitoring both of accumulation and degradation in vivo. Furthermore, in contrast to most optically active nanomaterials (carbon nanotubes, gold nanoparticles and
%K Nicola Daldosso
%K Nanomedicine
%K Deposition
%K Nanomaterials
%U https://www.longdom.org/abstract/nanomedicine-2017-inorganic-coating-of-luminescent-porous-silicon-for-nanomedicine-applications-54170.html