Nanozymes, in nature, are artificial enzymes. Innovated by Ronald Breslow to mimic enzymes. Nanozymes have widespread applications including targeted cancer therapy, diagnostic medicine and bio-sensing even environmental toxicology. However, these applications are a novel research field in biomedicine, but are growing fast. Enzyme-based applications such as immune-absorbent assay (ELIZA) are expensive because of the complexity of producing enzymes and antibodies. Not only, some nanoparticles can mimic these enzymes such as superoxides, but also they can manipulate biological pathways directly like autophagy. These abilities make them a suitable alternative for both therapy and diagnosis. In this review, we opted on metal nanoparticles and application of this cutting edged technology into modern medicine.
Today, nano-medicine promotes new therapeutics and diagnostics tools, including sensing of biomolecules as a biosensor, cancer chemotherapy and drug or gene delivery. Because of small size and biocompatibility of gold nanoparticles (GNPs), they become a good candidate for biological application. Also, thanks to their biological and chemical properties, they can mimic function of some enzymes including super oxide dismutase (SOD), esterase, etc. Also, biomaterials and bioengineering have grown so fast since the last decade for many therapeutic applications such as tissue regeneration. Among these cutting edge technology, nanomaterials find the way to becoming a very powerful tool for using in many fields of researchers including biosensing, gene therapy and chemotherapy. In this review, we focused on some biological applications of GNPs in biology and medicine.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.