Gold Nanoparticles Made to Heat Up from Near-Infrared Light for Tumor Killing

Gold has been a popular material to make nanoparticles because of its biocompatibility, but to get it to do some neat tricks isn’t enough to simply produce spherical gold nanoparticles. One limitation in using gold for killing tumors has been that cheap spherical gold nanoparticles are not plasmonic to near-infrared light, meaning they don’t heat up when such light illuminates them. Making gold nanoparticles plasmonic requires forming shapes out of the element that have been expensive to produce. Researchers at ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) have developed a new technique for cheap manufacturing of different shapes of plasmonic gold-based nanoparticles that may open new possibilities for cancer treatment.

Instead of creating new shapes purely out of gold, a difficult process, the team instead arranged readily available spherical gold nanoparticles coated with silicon dioxide into plasmonic shapes. The silicon dioxide works like a spacer, keeping the gold spheres at predefined distances…