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

Carabineiro, Sónia Alexandra Correia

In a more recent study, colloidal gold particles were used as carriers of protein antigen of the capsid of the TBE virus in the antiviral vaccine [104] . After two inoculations, the mice in that study were found to resist challenge with 100,000 times the 50% lethal dose (LD50) of JEV (Beijing-1 strain), even when immunized with a relatively small dose of 0.5 mug of plasmid DNA. Japanese B encephalitis vaccine is an important vaccine to prevent this serious mosquito-borne disease caused by the virus [105, 106] . There are some semiquantitative methods to determine this vaccine, such as plaque forming unit and the animal testing, but they have low sensitivity, are time-consuming, and have a high cost. A label-free amperometric immunosensor for fast and sensitive assay of Japanese B encephalitis vaccine was reported with a specific response in the range 1.1 × 10 −8 to 1.9 × 10 −6 lg·pfu/mL (pfu/mL is plaque forming unit and lg is common logarithm) with a detection limit of 6 × 10 −9 lg·pfu/mL [105] . An immunosensor based on the immobilization of antiserum of Japanese B encephalitis on a gold electrode modified by [nano-Au/Co(bipyridine) 3 3+ ] 2 /nano-Au/L-cysteine has also been reported [106] . It exhibited fast potentiometric high sensitivity and long-term stability. These works are promising test methods for biological products.