Silica, the mineral of which sand is made, is generally inert in the body and can be modified easily using a variety of well-established chemical reactions.
As such, researchers have considered silica an ideal candidate material from which to create multifunctional nanoparticles. Indeed, several teams of investigators have crafted porous nanoparticles and shown that these materials hold promise as drug delivery vehicles (click here for earlier news story), imaging agents (click here for earlier news story), and even nanoscale collection devices for cancer markers (click here for earlier news story).
Now, thanks to work from Chung-Yuan Mou, Ph.D., and colleagues at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, researchers have a new method for making silica nanoparticles that not only have carefully sized pores and are of a very narrow size distribution, but that are also magnetic and luminescent. The multiple functionality could enable investigators to create nanoparticles that can both image and treat tumors simultaneously. This work appears in the journal Chemistry of Materials.