Smart nanocarriers for drug delivery: controllable LSPR tuning

Abstract

Gold nanostructures are considered as a potential platform for building smart nanocarriers that will form the basis of novel methods of targeted delivery and controlled release of drugs. However, to ensure maximum efficiency of gold nanoparticles upon the drug release via the plasmon-enhanced photothermal effect, it is necessary to optimize their spectral parameters for operation in the human body that requires both theoretical research and development of appropriate methods for nanostructures fabrication. In this work, mathematical modeling of light extinction spectral dependences for gold nanostructures of different morphology was performed to determine their geometric parameters that provide the occurrence of localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) in the red and near infrared regions of the spectrum, where the transparency window of biological tissues exists. Based on the results of previous studies and computer modeling, using hollow gold nanoshells to construct smart nanocarriers was found to be most reasonable. A protocol for production of these nanoparticles based on "silver-gold" galvanic replacement reaction, which is accompanied by a controlled shift of the LSPR wavelength position, was proposed and described in detail. It is shown that the loading of model biomolecules in hollow gold nanoshells significantly changes the output optical parameters of the system under investigation, which should be taken into account for matching with the laser excitation wavelength during the development of smart nanocarriers.

Moving the Plasmon of LaB6 from IR to Near-IR via Eu-Doping

“…Plasmonic nanoparticles are well known for their intriguing properties [ 1 ], and are being explored in a variety of fields such as photovoltaics [ 2 ], nanosensors [ 3 ], drug delivery devices [ 4 ], and quantum optics [ 5 ]. The physical properties of plasmonic materials are typically easy to tune because of their high carrier concentration and small size, where seemingly minor adjustments such as altering the particle shape or size have a substantial influence on the absorbance spectrum [ 1 ].…”

Nanostructured Color Filters: A Review of Recent Developments

“…The emergence of Extraordinary Optical Transmission (EOT) [9] due to coupling of surface plasmons in a surface lattice has been a breakthrough. It has been widely used and its applications include drug delivery [125], imaging [126,127], color filtering [128,129], high resolution display [130] and high sensitive sensing [131,132]. Since the research in the field of plasmonics is expedited with the discovery of new materials and design fabrication techniques [72,92,133], this review focuses on and evaluates those developments.…”