Curcumin-mediated synthesis of magnetite and gold nanoparticles for biomedical applications

Over the past decades, nanotechnologies gained researchers’ attention because of the unique features that make nanostructures suitable for applications in several fields. Among these, nanomedicine represents a promising area of research also due to the possibility to develop multifunctional nanoplatforms for bioimaging, drug delivery, and hyperthermia treatment, just to list a few. However, some issues are related to the conventional methods of synthesis that can require conditions like very high temperatures or the use of toxic and pollutant reagents. For this reason, in the last years, studies focused on the development of simple and eco-friendly approaches able to overcome the mentioned problems. The present thesis contains an overview on this new current of research (that involves the use of biological agents like plants, microbes or simple biomolecules in the design of nanoparticles), followed by a deepening on the characteristics of curcumin biomolecule, in order to use it during the experimental work as reducing and stabilizing agent, as well as for the linking of different nanoparticles for the production of hybrid nanostructures. Laboratory tests concerned the investigation of new synthesis routes to produce magneto-plasmonic nanoplatforms containing magnetite nanoparticles and gold nanoparticles. First, curcumin was used as reducing and stabilizing agent in gold nanoparticles synthesis and different methods have been designed to graft the biomolecule to magnetite nanoparticles. Then, some attempts have been carried out with the aim of conjugating gold and magnetite nanoparticles through the innovative use of curcumin. Finally, the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) was employed to characterize the nanoparticles composition and the dynamic light scattering (DLS) to determine their hydrodynamic radius and size distribution, while the analysis of optical properties was performed using the ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy.