Toxicity determination of Ag nanoparticles by monitoring fibroblast attachment on gold interdigitated electrodes

M. CELINA BONETTO; DRAGO STICKER; VERENA CHARWAT; EDUARDO CORTÓN; PETER ERTL

Congreso; LVII Reunión Científica Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación Clínica, SAIC; 2012

Clinical applications of nanoparticles (NPs) have improved detection sensitivity in medical imaging, raised therapeutic effectiveness through targeted drug delivery and decreased the associated side effects of drugs. But NPs can potentially cause adverse effects on organ, tissue, cellular, sub cellular, and protein levels leading to reactive oxygen species generation, the initiation of an inflammatory response and perturbation and destruction of the mitochondria causing apoptosis or necrosis. In vitro studies to determine toxicity in cultured cells have several advantages, including rapid results with low cost and decreasing the need for animal use. However, it has been shown that NPs may produce in vitro toxicity in some cell-based assays, but not in others.The dielectric properties of biological materials allow the development of a wide variety ofassays based on electrochemical measurements of cell cultures for applications in medicine and biology. For instance, if cells are placed on photolithographic electrodes, the cellular impedance signal resulting from the cell membranes insulation can be measured using a potentiostat. Impedance measurements with interdigitated electrodes (IDES) have already been used to study NP toxicity, but the measurements have always been run only after preincubating the cells for 22-24 hours with or without NPs. In an attempt to speed up the bioassay, we present here preliminary impedance measurements of fibroblast (NHDF) cell attachment after incubation for 20 or 60 minutes in the presence and absence of Ag NPs under shaking conditions. We wanted to study if the NPs produced some effect on NHDF cells after a short exposure time in order to design a faster bioassay. We could observe differences in impedance measurements between NHDF cells incubated with or without Ag NPs either after 20 minutes or 60 minutes. We could also observe less cells attached on the IDES if they were incubated with NPs.