Branched gold nanoparticles are potential photothermal therapy agents because of their large absorption cross section in the near-infrared window. Upon laser irradiation they produce enough heat to destroy tumor cells. In this work, branched gold nanoparticles are biofunctionalized with nanobodies, the smallest fully functional antigen-binding fragments evolved from the variable domain, the VHH, of a camel heavy chain-only antibody. These nanobodies bind to the HER2 antigen which is highly expressed on breast and ovarian cancer cells. Flow cytometric analysis and dark field images of HER2 positive SKOV3 cells incubated with anti-HER2 conjugated branched gold nanoparticles show specific cell targeting. Laser irradiation studies reveal that HER2 positive SKOV3 cells exposed to the anti-HER2 targeted branched gold nanoparticles are destroyed after five minutes of laser treatment at 38 W/cm(2) using a 690 nm continuous wave laser. Starting from a nanoparticle optical density of 4, cell death is observed, whereas the control samples, nanoparticles with anti-PSA nanobodies, nanoparticles only, and laser only, do not show any cell death. These results suggest that this new type of bioconjugated branched gold nanoparticles are effective antigen-targeted photothermal therapeutic agents for cancer treatment.

We present the top-down synthesis of a novel type of MRI T2 contrast agent with great control over size and shape using a colloidal lithography technique. The resulting synthetic antiferromagnetic nanoparticles (SAF-NPs) yield improved relaxivities compared to superparamagnetic iron oxide alternatives (SPIONs). For T2 weighted imaging, the outer sphere relaxation theory has shown that the sensitivity of a T2 contrast agent is dependent on the particle size with an optimal size that exceeds the superparamagnetic limit of SPIONs. With the use of the interlayer exchange coupling effect, the SAF-NPs presented here do not suffer from this limit. Adjusting the outer sphere relaxation theory for spherical particles to SAF-NPs, we show both theoretically and experimentally that the SAF-NP size can be optimized to reach the r2 maximum. With measured r2 values up to 355 s(-1) mM(-1), our SAF-NPs show better performance than commercial alternatives and are competitive with the state-of-the-art. This performance is confirmed in an in vitro MRI study on SKOV3 cells.

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The need for sensitive imaging techniques to detect tumor cells is an important issue in cancer diagnosis and therapy. Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), realized by chemisorption of compounds suitable for Raman spectroscopy onto gold nanoparticles, is a new method for detecting a tumor. As a proof of concept, we studied the use of biocompatible gold nanostars as sensitive SERS contrast agents targeting an ovarian cancer cell line (SKOV3). Due to a high intracellular uptake of gold nanostars after 6 hours of exposure, they could be detected and located with SERS. Using these nanostars for passive targeting after systemic injection in a xenograft mouse model, a detectable signal was measured in the tumor and liver in vivo. These signals were confirmed by ex vivo SERS measurements and darkfield microscopy. In this study, we established SERS nanostars as a highly sensitive contrast agent for tumor detection, which opens the potential for their use as a theranostic agent against cancer.