ABSTRACT
According to Dawson et al. (2009), charged nanoparticles can alter the local physical properties of lipid membranes [22]. The authors suggest that nanoparticles with a diameter of less than 100 nm are able to enter cells via the cellular membrane, nanoparticles with a diameter less than 40 nm can enter the cellular nuclei, and nanoparticles with a diameter less than 35 nm can pass through the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain interfering with the neural brain cells, thus constituting the brain area target for those nanoparticles. The latest report is compatible with the placenta barrier penetration of nanomaterials as this barrier is a very strong one, consisting of a coherent endothelium and basement membrane and surrounded by syncytiotrophoblastic cells with tight epithelial junctions. Those criteria are similar to those of the coherent blood brain barrier. Therefore, particles from the environment or from drugs encountered below a certain size are considered to be able to pass through the placental barrier, but this issue has to be further studied [9,23]. Understanding the way nanoparticles interact with living matter will open up fundamentally new opportunities in medicine and diagnostics. Charged nanoparticles can alter the local physical properties of cellular membranes, which could shed new light on the interactions between living cells and nanomaterials. Modern literature is focusing on the way that nanoparticles can interact with living tissues and will give the opportunity to biomedical sciences for new therapeutic methods and new diagnostic fields [3,24]. New drug-delivery systems raise enormous scientific interest, giving hope for disease treatment and disease control, using technologies with novel nanoparticles and nanodevices [25]. Placenta and nanotoxicity is in their very preliminary status of international research discussion and very recently this type of research has been developed [9,23], as until now little information has been provided on whether maternal organism exposed to nanoparticles during pregnancy, either via the environmental pollution or via drug treatment, can pass those nanoparticles to their embryos/foetuses via the placenta barrier. Researchers, though, would like to determine how nanoparticles might be used for therapeutic purposes in the future and a solution for this issue could be considered if they could be charged with new drug molecules as vehicles assigned to targeted embryonic/foetal organs and systems via the placenta barrier, without any harmful effects to the maternal
organism. A very useful query of today’s research on nanomaterials is to determine according to their structure why nanomaterials might exert toxicity on the placenta and on embryonic/foetal tissues and organs. This query is related to the international literature reports about the possible benefits versus toxicity of diverse nanomaterials and how this balance can have an inclinator to the benefits decreasing the toxicity of them [9, 23].
