Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles in Bioimaging

Abstract

A biomedical contrast agent serves to enhance the visualisation of a specific (potentially targeted) physiological region. In recent years, mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) have developed as a flexible imaging platform of tuneable size/morphology, abundant surface chemistry, biocompatibility and otherwise useful physiochemical properties. This review discusses MSN structural types and synthetic strategies, as well as methods for surface functionalisation. Recent applications in biomedical imaging are then discussed, with a specific emphasis on magnetic resonance and optical modes together with utility in multimodal imaging.

Gadolinium-Coated Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticle for Magnetic Resonance Imaging

“…These biochemical parameters included glutamic aspartate transaminase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), total bilirubin (T-BIL), blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and creatinine (Cr), all of which had no significant differences when compared with the control group (Gd-DTPA) on day 7 post-injection; thus, confirming that the primary function of both the kidneys and liver was not impaired post Gd 2 O 3 @MSN treatment. These results confirm the earlier findings around toxicity and support our hypothesis that this NP is well tolerated in living systems ( Bong and Jaeyun, 2019 ; Yuan et al, 2020 ).…”

Highly emissive hybrid mesoporous organometallo-silica nanoparticles for bioimaging

“…14 The design of fluorescent silica nanoparticles based on non-covalent inclusion or superficial grafting of conventional organic dyes, such as fluorescein or rhodamine, has attracted much research interest due to their remarkable properties. 15 However, these organic fluorescent molecules usually present aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ), and many of these inclusion approaches use reverse microemulsion or Stöber synthetic methods, leading, inevitably, to aggregation of the chromophores to produce MSNs with low emission efficiencies. To overcome this problem, several groups have doped MSNs with molecules featuring aggregation-induced emission (AIE) fluorescence or designed encapsulation methods to separate the chromophores.…”

Contemporary, Multidisciplinary Roles of Mesoporous Silica Nanohybrids/Nanocomposites

“…In the biomedical field MS Nps has garnered great attention due to its distinctive characteristics such as porosity, large pore volume, adjustable size and morphology, facile synthetic and modifying methods and most importantly biocompatibility and stability [48] . Silica materials have been exploited in biosensing, [49] bioimaging, [50] bioseparation, [51] therapeutic applications [52] cargo delivery [53] as discussed in this particular section. The highly porous structures and the high surface area to volume ratio makes MS Nps the ideal candidates for cargo loading purposes [54] .…”