A health concern regarding the protein corona, aggregation and disaggregation

TL;DR

This review explores how nanoparticle-protein interactions influence NP stability, toxicity, and therapeutic potential, emphasizing the importance of controlling protein corona formation to optimize medical applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of physicochemical factors affecting protein corona formation and discusses strategies for controlling protein adsorption to enhance NP-based therapies.

Findings

Uncontrolled protein attachment can cause aggregation and denaturation.

Controlled protein adsorption can enable therapeutic disaggregation of amyloid fibrils.

Protein corona parameters are more predictive than NP features alone.

Abstract

Nanoparticle (NP)-protein complexes exhibit the correct identity of NP in biological media. Therefore, protein-NP interactions should be closely explored to understand and to modulate the nature of NPs in medical implementations. This review focuses mainly on the physicochemical parameters such as dimension, surface chemistry, the morphology of NPs and influence of medium pH on the formation of protein corona and conformational changes of adsorbed proteins by different kinds of methods. Also, the impact of protein corona on the colloidal stability of NPs is discussed. Uncontrolled protein attachment on NPs may bring unwanted impacts such as protein denaturation and aggregation. In contrast, controlled protein adsorption by optimal concentration, size, pH and surface modification of NPs may result in potential implementation of NPs as therapeutic agents especially for disaggregation of amyloid fibrils. Also, the effect of NPs-protein corona on reducing the cytotoxicity and clinical implications such as drug delivery, cancer therapy, imaging and diagnosis will be discussed. Validated correlative physicochemical parameters for NP-protein corona formation frequently derived from protein corona fingerprints of NPs which are more valid than the parameters obtained only on the base of NP features. This review may provide useful information regarding the potency as well as the adverse effects of NPs to predict their behavior in the in vivo experiments.