Antibiofouling polymer-coated gold nanoparticles as a contrast agent for in vivo X-ray computed tomography imaging.

By Dongkyu Kim, Sangjin Park, Jae Hyuk Lee, Y. Jeong, S. Jon. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2007

839 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current computed tomography (CT) contrast agents such as iodine-based compounds have several limitations, including short imaging times due to rapid renal clearance, renal toxicity, and vascular permeation. Here, we describe a new CT contrast agent based on gold nanoparticles (GNPs) that overcomes these limitations. Because gold has a higher atomic number and X-ray absorption coefficient than iodine, we expected that GNPs can be used as CT contrast agents. We prepared uniform GNPs ( approximately 30 nm in diameter) by general reduction of HAuCl4 by boiling with sodium citrate. The resulting GNPs were coated with polyethylene glycol (PEG) to impart antibiofouling properties, which extends their lifetime in the bloodstream. Measurement of the X-ray absorption coefficient in vitro revealed that the attenuation of PEG-coated GNPs is 5.7 times higher than that of the current iodine-based CT contrast agent, Ultravist. Furthermore, when injected intravenously into rats, the PEG-coated GNPs had a much longer blood circulation time (>4 h) than Ultravist (<10 min). Consequently, CT images of rats using PEG-coated GNPs showed a clear delineation of cardiac ventricles and great vessels. On the other hand, relatively high levels of GNPs accumulated in the spleen and liver, which contain phagocytic cells. Intravenous injection of PEG-coated GNPs into hepatoma-bearing rats resulted in a high contrast ( approximately 2-fold) between hepatoma and normal liver tissue on CT images. These results suggest that PEG-coated GNPs can be useful as a CT contrast agent for a blood pool and hepatoma imaging.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a02912baf3de76c0a31e32e5627b19a1cdf6b036

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomaterials

  1. Ning Gu
  2. F. Xiong
  3. Fang Yang
  4. Dong Liu

In Biomedical Engineering

  1. Hak Soo Choi
  2. Dongkyu Kim
  3. John V. Frangioni
  4. Y. Jeong
  5. S. Jon

In Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

  1. John V. Frangioni
  2. Hak Soo Choi

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