Inorganic Nanoparticles for Biomedical Applications

Nanomedicine is a research area at the interface between nanotechnology and biotechnology that aims at developing nanosystems for diagnosis and therapy. As active materials to be used in both diagnosis and therapy, inorganic nanoparticles (INPs), in particular, are of great interest in nanomedicine. INPs have been applied in several therapy strategies, including active drug delivery, hyperthermia, and magnetothermia against cancer, and their use offer advantages in medical applications due to their physicochemical characteristics, such as localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) effect—present in Au and Ag nanoparticles, for example—and the magnetic and photoluminescence properties of magnetic nanoparticles and quantum dots, respectively. The application of INPs in molecular imaging and drug delivery has benefited from their reduced size, which allows the INPs to overcome cell barriers that conventional drugs cannot do, such as the blood–brain barrier. In addition to the physical and chemical properties of the INPs, their surface modifications using biomolecules provide specificity to the nanocarrier systems to increase absorption and biodistribution. This chapter describes the main characteristics and the most relevant applications of gold, silver, quantum dots, ceramics, and magnetic nanoparticles in biomedicine.