Date of Submission

Spring 2014

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Biology; Chemistry

Project Advisor 1

Christopher LaFratta

Project Advisor 2

Michael Tibbetts

Abstract/Artist's Statement

The chemotherapy drug cisplatin is used to treat a wide variety of cancers; however, it has a number of side effects, such as damage to hearing or balance functions of the ear defined as ototoxicity, that can limit its use. The goal of this study was to use larval zebrafish as an in vivo model to investigate whether conjugation to gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) reduces cisplatin’s ototoxicity. AuNPs-cisplatin conjugates were synthesized using a seeded-growth approach, and the loading of cisplatin on the nanoparticles was measured by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). The conjugates synthesized were found to contain too low of a concentration of cisplatin to perform ototoxicity testing with. The results of systemic toxicity assays showed that the high (> 5 nM NPs) concentrations of AuNPs in the conjugates were themselves acutely toxic to zebrafish larvae. The findings suggest that severe systemic toxicity reduces the feasibility of using larval zebrafish as a model to study the effects of AuNPs at high (> 5 nM NPs) concentrations, providing important information about the concentration- dependence of AuNPs toxicity. However, no conclusions could be made about whether nanoconjugation reduces cisplatin’s ototoxicity.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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