Dhiraj Kumar, Isha Mutreja, Kenny Chitcholtan, Peter Sykes

Nanomedicine has advanced the biomedical field with the availability of multifunctional nanoparticle (NPs) systems that can target a disease site enabling drug delivery and helping to monitor the disease. In this paper, we synthesised the gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) with an average size 18, 40, 60 and 80 nm, and studied the effect of nanoparticles size, concentration and incubation time on ovarian cancer cells namely, OVCAR5, OVCAR8, and SKOV3. The size measured by transmission electron microscopy images was slightly smaller than the hydrodynamic diameter; measured size by ImageJ as 14.55 nm, 38.13 nm, 56.88 nm and 78.56 nm. The cellular uptake was significantly controlled by the AuNPs size, concentration, and the cell type. The nanoparticles uptake increased with increasing concentration, and 18 nm and 80 nm gold nanoparticles showed higher uptake ranging from 1.3 µg to 5.4 µg depending upon the concentration and cell type. The AuNPs were associated with a temporary reduction in metabolic activity, but metabolic activity remained more than 60% for all sample types; NPs significantly affected the cell proliferation activity in first 12 h. The increase in nanoparticle size and concentration induced the production of reactive oxygen species in 24 h.