title: Size and charge of nanoparticles following incubation with human plasma of healthy and pancreatic cancer patients.
abstract: When nanoparticles (NPs) enter a biological environment, proteins bind to their surface forming a protein coating, which alters NP features giving it a biological identity, which controls its physiological response. The NP biological identity (size, charge and aggregation state) does strictly correlate with its physicochemical properties and the nature of the biological environment. While the former relationship has been extensively investigated, whether and how alterations in the physiological environment affect the biological identity of the NPs remains unclear. In this work we enrolled healthy and histologically proven pancreatic cancer patients. A statistically significant reduction in the level of clinically relevant proteins in cancer patients occurred. Positively and negatively charged lipid nanoparticles with two different surface chemistries (plain and PEGylated) were incubated with human plasma from both groups and characterized thoroughly by dynamic light scattering and zeta potential measurements. Only when plain positively charged NPs were tested, significant difference in zeta-potential between healthy and pancreatic cancer groups was found. This result implies that pooling human plasma from healthy volunteers might lead to a bias and thus unpredictable consequences in regard to previously optimized targeting profile.
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Medicine, "Sapienza" University of Rome, Viale Regina Elena 291, 00161 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: giulio.caracciolo@uniroma1.it.
authors.forename: Giulio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Caracciolo
authors.affiliation: University Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, General Surgery, Via Álvaro del Portillo 200, 00128 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Damiano
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Caputo
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Medicine, "Sapienza" University of Rome, Viale Regina Elena 291, 00161 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pozzi
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Medicine, "Sapienza" University of Rome, Viale Regina Elena 291, 00161 Rome, Italy; Center for Life Nano Science@Sapienza, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Viale Regina Elena 291, 00161 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Colapicchioni
authors.affiliation: University Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, General Surgery, Via Álvaro del Portillo 200, 00128 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Coppola
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008081:Liposomes / Q000737:chemistry; D053758:Nanoparticles / Q000737:chemistry*; D010190:Pancreatic Neoplasms / Q000378:metabolism*; D010949:Plasma
chemical_list: D008081:Liposomes