Date of Publication

Spring 5-2-2014

Document Type

Undergraduate Project

First Supervisor

Fernando Ontiveros Phd.

Abstract

Nanoparticles (NPs) provide a new medical approach to drug therapy. As with every new approach, safety precautions need to be taken, and the immediate and long-term effects for many NPs are still unclear. When administering a medical treatment into the human body, the first issue that needs to be addressed is host detection of the medicine and inflammation as a possible result of the treatment. If a new NP treatment causes inflammation before it releases its medicine, that treatment may be ineffective, even damaging to the patient. Small metallic and organic particles have been shown to elicit an inflammatory responses in humans. In order to gauge the immune cell reaction to commonly-used nanoparticles, we exposed leukemic Mus musculus macrophages to copper, silver, iron and lipid NPs. We measured cell death and cytokine production to assess the affects of these nanoparticles.

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