Surface Modification Techniques for Iron Oxide Nanoparticles

Student: Sherrica Tai
Department: Pharmaceutical Sciences
Advisor: Sri Sridhar

Abstract

Many biomedical applications have reaped the beneficial use of magnetic nanoparticles, which include drug delivery, diseases diagnosis and therapy, and as image enhancement agent in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). For their use in these applications, surface modification is a crucial process that has to be carried out.

Iron oxide nanoparticle surfaces will be modified by a variety of surface modification techniques. Using the concept of layer-by-layer technique, the surface of the nanoparticles (NPs) will be modified with polyelectrolytes to introduce +vely or –vely charged surfaces. Surface of the nanoparticles will also be modified with antibiotics such as vancomycin to selectively target the outer cell membrane of certain strains of bacteria. Another approach of surface modification is through gold shell formation. Using silanization chemistry, thiol and amine surface will be created on the surface of iron oxide NPs. These sites will then be used as an anchor to bind small gold NPs forming a thin shell of gold. This gold shell can then be readily conjugated with a variety of biomolecules for biomedical applications. Thus the goal of this project is to offer different surface modification techniques for iron oxide NPs for various biomedical applications.