Towards the Identification of an In Vitro Tool for Assessing the Biological Behavior of Aerosol Supplied Nanomaterials

Luisana Di Cristo, Ciaran Manus Maguire, Karen Mc Quillan, Mattia Aleardi, Yuri Volkov, Dania Movia and Adriele Prina-Mello
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Luisana Di Cristo: Laboratory for Biological Characterization of Advanced Materials (LBCAM) and Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI), School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 8, Ireland
Ciaran Manus Maguire: Laboratory for Biological Characterization of Advanced Materials (LBCAM) and Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI), School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 8, Ireland
Karen Mc Quillan: Laboratory for Biological Characterization of Advanced Materials (LBCAM) and Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI), School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 8, Ireland
Mattia Aleardi: Department of Earth Sciences, University of Pisa, 56126 Pisa, Italy
Yuri Volkov: AMBER Centre, CRANN Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland
Dania Movia: Laboratory for Biological Characterization of Advanced Materials (LBCAM) and Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI), School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 8, Ireland
Adriele Prina-Mello: Laboratory for Biological Characterization of Advanced Materials (LBCAM) and Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI), School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 8, Ireland

IJERPH, 2018, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-19

Abstract: Nanoparticles (NP)-based inhalation systems for drug delivery can be administered in liquid form, by nebulization or using pressurized metered dose inhalers, and in solid form by means of dry powder inhalers. However, NP delivery to the lungs has many challenges including the formulation instability due to particle-particle interactions and subsequent aggregation, causing poor deposition in the small distal airways and subsequent alveolar macrophages activity, which could lead to inflammation. This work aims at providing an in vitro experimental design for investigating the correlation between the physico-chemical properties of NP, and their biological behavior, when they are used as NP-based inhalation treatments, comparing two different exposure systems. By means of an aerosol drug delivery nebulizer, human lung cells cultured at air–liquid interface (ALI) were exposed to two titanium dioxide NP (NM-100 and NM-101), obtained from the JRC repository. In parallel, ALI cultures were exposed to NP suspension by direct inoculation, i.e., by adding the NP suspensions on the apical side of the cell cultures with a pipette. The formulation stability of NP, measured as hydrodynamic size distributions, the cell viability, cell monolayer integrity, cell morphology and pro-inflammatory cytokines secretion were investigated. Our results demonstrated that the formulation stability of NM-100 and NM-101 was strongly dependent on the aggregation phenomena that occur in the conditions adopted for the biological experiments. Interestingly, comparable biological data between the two exposure methods used were observed, suggesting that the conventional exposure coupled to ALI culturing conditions offers a relevant in vitro tool for assessing the correlation between the physico-chemical properties of NP and their biological behavior, when NP are used as drug delivery systems.

Keywords: aerosol exposure; nanotechnology-based inhalation treatments; titanium dioxide nanoparticles; air–liquid interface (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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