Aplicaciones de nanopartículas magnéticas en biología y medicina

R.D. ZYSLER

Rosario

Congreso; IX Congreso y XXVII Reunión Anual de la Soc. de Biólogos de Rosario; 2008

Asociación de Biología de Rosario

Magnetic nanoparticles offer some attractive possibilities in biomedicine. They have controllable sizes at dimensions that are smaller than or comparable to those of a cell (10?100μm), a virus (20?450 nm), a protein (5?50 nm) or a gene (2 nm wide and 10?100 nm long). This means that they can get close to a biological entity of interest. Indeed, they can be coated with biological molecules to make them interact with or bind to a biological entity, thereby providing a controllable means of deliver it.The magnetic nature of the nanoparticles allows the manipulation by an external magnetic field gradient. This fact opens up many applications involving the transport and/or immobilization of magnetic nanoparticles, or the magnetically tagged biological entities. In this way they can be use to deliver a package, such as an anticancer drug, or a cohort of radionuclide atoms, to a targeted region of the body, such as a tumor. Also, the magnetic nanoparticles can be prepared to respond to a time-varying magnetic field, transferring the energy from the exciting field to the nanoparticle. Then, the particle can be used to heat up the cells, as hyperthermia agents, to targeted bodies such as tumors. These, and many other potential applications, are made available in biomedicine as a result of the special physical properties of magnetic nanoparticles.In this talk some current biomedical applications of magnetic nanoparticles are reviewed: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast enhancement, drug delivery, hyperthermia treatments and magnetic sensing of proteins and DNA chains.