ABSTRACT
Progress in the fabrication of inorganic materials has led to a plethora of applications in the field of biomedical therapeutics. The development of robust and versatile chemical syntheses has provided tools for engineering inorganic nanomaterials with different sizes, shapes, and other properties. Nanomaterials such as gold nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and silica nanoparticles attracted considerable attention in their pharmaceutical applications due to their biocompatibility and ability to facilitate the delivery of therapeutic cargos. Also, coating of nanomaterials with cationic polymers has found numerous applications in gene and siRNA delivery. The gold–thiol interaction has been employed since decades to immobilize thiol-containing macromolecules to gold surfaces. An alternative approach to direct gold–thiol conjugation is the electrostatic interaction between the negatively charged siRNA molecules and the AuNPs surface. Silica-based nanoparticles have been investigated as nucleic acids delivery vectors due to their inherent biocompatibility and low toxicity.
