Pharmacokinetics, clearance, and biosafety of polyethylene glycol-coated hollow gold nanospheres

Gold nanoparticles have attracted enormous interest as potential theranostic agents. However, little is known about the long-term elimination and systemic toxicity of gold nanoparticles in the literature. Hollow gold nanospheres (HAuNS) is a class of photothermal conducting agent that have shown promises in photoacoustic imaging, photothermal ablation therapy, and drug delivery. It's very necessary to make clear the biosafety of HAuNS for its further application. We investigated the cytotoxicity, complement activation, and platelet aggregation of polyethylene glycol (PEG)-coated HAuNS (PEG-HAuNS, average diameter of 63 nm) in vitro and their pharmacokinetics, biodistribution, organ elimination, hematology, clinical chemistry, acute toxicity, and chronic toxicity in mice. PEG-HAuNS did not induce detectable activation of the complement system and did not induce detectable platelet aggregation. The blood half-life of PEG-HAuNS in mice was 8.19 ± 1.4 hr. The single effective dose of PEG-HAuNS in photothermal ablation therapy was determined to be 12.5 mg/kg. PEG-HAuNS caused no adverse effects after 10 daily intravenous injections over a 2-week period at a dose of 12.5 mg/kg per injection (accumulated dose: 125 mg/kg). Quantitative analysis of the muscle, liver, spleen, and kidney revealed that the levels of Au decreased 45.2%, 28.6%, 41.7%, and 40.8%, respectively, from day 14 to day 90 after the first intravenous injection, indicating that PEG-HAuNS was slowly cleared from these organs in mice. Our data support the use of PEG-HAuNS as a promising photothermal conducting agent.