Applications of Gold Nanoparticles in Nanomedicine: Recent Advances in Vaccines †

Carabineiro, Sónia Alexandra Correia

An efficient delivery to cells is needed and gold nanoparticles have proved to be excellent carriers [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] [88] [89] . Gold nanoparticles enabled efficient antigen delivery to dendritic cells and then activated the cells to facilitate cross-presentation, inducing antigen-specific cytotoxic T-lymphocyte responses for effective cancer therapy [88] . Moreover, they show several advantages over other nanoparticulate-based carriers, such as the ease with which they control their size for different applications, the variety of antigens and adjuvants that can be easily linked to and displayed on their surface, the fact that they can be detected using non-invasive imaging techniques, providing clinicians with information on where or whether the vaccines have been delivered, which helps to predict or evaluate therapeutic efficacy, and the biocompatibility and non-toxicity of gold [86, 87, 90] . Au nanoparticle immunotherapies are well suited for synergistic combination therapy with existing cancer therapies such as photothermal ablation [59, 87] . All these features suggest that gold nanoparticle-based antigen delivery systems may be a useful vaccine technology that is able to prevent and/or treat cancer. The several functionalities of gold nanoparticles make them promising vehicles for immune therapies, especially for combinatorial treatment approaches that target multiple immune pathways (Figure 3) .