Exposure Pathways and Toxicity of Fullerenes

Abstract

Fullerenes have become very popular nowadays in the field of cosmetic and medicine as “radical sponge” because of their high antioxidant activities. However, there are worries about the toxicity of fullerenes due to their special chemical properties and good ability to enter the human body. In this article, it is found that fullerenes have been proved to have the ability to enter animal body through skin penetration, peroral administration and pulmonary absorption beside initiative injection. The potential mechanism of fullerene toxicity is to interrupt the activation process of protein, cause mitochondrial dysfunction and generate ROS to damage organism. Nevertheless, the experiments result shows the negative effects of fullerenes only occur in a high dose and the assessments of fullerenes toxicity show a low result with the IC50 value and LD50 value to be 383.4 lg/mL to HEK293 and 721mg/kg to mice. It is suggested that fullerenes can rarely affect human health as long as people are exposed to the appropriate dose of fullerenes and the toxicity of fullerenes can further reduce via synthesis of fullerene derivates.