The Beauty of Gold: Endless Configurations for Personalized Cancer and Brain Disease Therapies

Overcoming biological barriers, particularly of tumors and brain, remains one of the greatest challenges for drug delivery. Gold nanoparticles are emerging as advantageous agents for various biomedical applications, including drug delivery, due to their biocompatibility, unique physicochemical properties, and ideal contrast for non-invasive computed tomography imaging. This talk will present the capabilities of gold nanoparticles to specifically target tumors and enable effective immunotherapy, while concomitantly providing rapid image-guided stratification. The talk will further show the capabilities of gold nanoparticles with natural coating to overcome the blood-brain barrier and shuttle tumor-targeting antibodies into the brain, as well as their ability to transfer CRISPR/Cas across cell barriers and achieve efficient gene editing. Furthermore, the talk will present the challenges, and gold nanoparticle-based solutions, for tracking therapeutic cells and exosomes in vivo, as shown in different mouse models for cancer and brain disease. Taken together, these approaches have potential to open a wide array of possibilities for patient-specific treatment of cancers and brain diseases.