COMPLEMENT ACTIVATION BY GOLD NANOPARTICLES: MECHANISM AND APPLICATION

Abstract

The complement system is a key humoral component of innate immunity, serving as the first line of defense and exerting its functional effects on adaptive immunity upon being activated. Recently, activation of the complement system is emerging as an indicator of biocompatibility of nanomaterials in the context of increasing use of nanomaterials in biomedical applications. Gold nanoparticles are widely used in biomedical applications, but its interactions with the complement system remain poorly understood. This thesis was initiated to investigate the mechanism of complement activation by a library of gold nanoparticles of different sizes, shapes as well as surface chemistries. It was found that this library activated the complement system differently. While this finding highlighted the adverse effects of gold nanoparticles used as delivery platforms, it was successfully exploited for the development of subunit vaccine against dengue virus in this study.