CITOTOXICITY OF METALLIC NANOPARTICLES
IN TUMORAL AND NON-TUMORAL BREAST CELLS
Pugliese, G. O.1 ; Valentini, M. B.1 , Marcato, P.D.2 , Duran, N.3 , Ferreira-Halder1 , C. V.,
de Jesus, M. B.1*
*[email protected]
1
Departamento de Bioquímica, Laboratório de biotecnologia in vitro e transdução de sinal
Instituto de Biologia, CP 6109, Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP
13083-970, Campinas, SP, Brasil.
2 Departamento de Ciências Farmacêuticas, FCFRP - Faculdade de Ciências Farmacêuticas de
Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo – USP, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil.
3 Instituto de Química, Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP, CP 6154, Campinas,
SP, Brasil.
Nanotechnology consists in developing nanoparticles, nanorobots, among others nanodevices.
It has emerged as a very promising field to improve mankind life and day-by-day its
applications are becoming a reality. Applications of nanotechnology in medicine are known as
nanomedicine, whose goal is to prevent, diagnostic or cure diseases. Nanomedicine approaches
are expected to revolutionize the treatment of many diseases, including breast cancer, the
leading cause of cancer death among women. Moreover, there is no efficient treatment for
breast cancer at advanced stages. Alternatively, metallic nanoparticles, present in some
cosmetic formulation, has been investigated as an antitumor agent in breast cancer cells.
However, the fact that they are already commercialized does not guarantee their safety as an
antitumor agent and some questions about their toxicity are not yet fully clarified. Therefore,
we decided to study the toxicity of metallic nanoparticles in both breast cancer cells (MCF7 and
MDA MB-231) and in breast epithelial cells (HB4). We used two different methods (MTT
assay and Neutral red) to assess metallic nanoparticles-mediated cytotoxicity in all cell lines.
Results showed metallic nanoparticles were toxic to both tumor and non-tumor cell lines. Both
methods revealed similar IC50 values for all cell lines tested. In addition, we observed the
cytotoxic effect took place only few hours (~2 h) after treatment. In summary, it is still early to
conclude rather these metallic nanoparticles are a safe alternative for advanced breast cancer
treatment. We intend to further investigate the molecular bases of the interaction between
metallic nanoparticles and breast cancer cells to answer this question.
Supported by FAPESP