Invited Paper NL+AS+BI-ThA1
Nanoscale Interface Between Engineered Matter and Living Organisms: Understanding the Biological Identity of Nanosized Materials

Thursday, October 31, 2013, 2:00 pm, Room 201 B

Nanoscale materials can interact with living organisms in a qualitatively different manner than small molecules. Crucially, biological phenomena such as immune clearance, cellular uptake and biological barrier crossing are all determined by processes on the nanometer scale. Harnessing these endogeneous biological processes (for example in creation of new nanomedicines or nanodiagnostics) will therefore require us to work on the nanoscale. This ensures that nanoscience, biology and medicine will be intimately connected for generations to come, and may well provide the best hope of tacking currently intractable diseases. These same scientific observations lead to widespread concern about the potential safety of nanomaterials in general. Early unfocussed concerns have diminished, leaving a more disciplined and balanced scientific dialogue. In particular a growing interest in understanding the fundamental principles of bionanointeractions may offer insight into potential hazard, as well as the basis for therapeutic use. Whilst nanoparticle size is important, the detailed nature of the nanoparticle interface is key to understanding interactions with living organisms. This interface may be quite complex, involving also adsorbed proteins from the biological fluid (blood, or other), leading to a ‘protein corona’ on the nanoparticle surface that determines its “biological identity.”We discuss how this corona is formed, how it is a determining feature in biological interactions, and indeed how in many cases can undermine efforts at targeting nanoparticles using simple grafting strategies. Thus, nanoparticle interactions with living organisms cannot be fully understood without explicitly accounting for the interactions with its surroundings, i.e. the nature of the corona.

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