Magnetic Nanoparticles in Regenerative Medicine - Current Role and Future Perspectives

Together with the regenerative medicine (RM) and personalized therapies, nanomedicine represents one of the fields of advanced therapies that are sought to drastically revolutionize heath care and significantly improve quality of life at a global level. Based on nanoscience and nanotechnology, nanomedicine methods have already entered the field of clinical application by means of drug delivery solutions and contrast agents for medical Imagistics while nano-based carrier and nano-biosensors are in different stages of testing for clinical applications. The use of nano-scaled materials, particularly of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) has evolved as an increasing field of research in life sciences. Both physical and chemical properties of MNPs are relevant for a wide scale of medical application for the diagnostic, prevention and treatment of various diseases. Iron oxide based MNPs are being explored as agents for cellular magnetic separation magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or drug delivery. MNPs have been proposed as tracking agents for cell delivery in various cellular therapy scenarios. In the context of multimodal therapies for the treatment of solid malignancies, the use of hyperthermia (HT) as an adjuvant therapy can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century. During the last decades, different forms of HT have been used in combination with radio- or chemotherapy. However, local and systemic side effects on healthy tissues are limiting its application. MNPs-based HT treatment of malignancies has gained significant interest in the recent years as they are able to deliver local targeted HT of improved precision compared to the traditional methods. MNPs are tested as modalities to increase efficiency of scaffold fabrication, scaffold functionalization and cell patterning in tissue engineering. MNPs bound to cells can be used to deliver highly controllable mechanical stimulation while within a magnetic field, improving stem cell differentiation especially to musculoskeletal lineages. Cells that have incorporated MNPs or magnetic cationic liposomes can be manipulated to construct three dimensional structures for scaffold free tissue engineering strategies such as cell sheet fabrication, spheroid formation or cell clustering. Placed at the frontier between nanomedicine, tissue regeneration and cell therapy, this chapter describes the current applications of MNPs for the design of advanced therapies as well as future avenues for research and development in this increasingly impacting field.

Keywords: Nanomedicine, Magnetic nanoparticles, Regenerative medicine, Stem cell therapy, Tissue engineering, Nanotoxicity, Nanoparticle internalization, Magnetic actuation, Cellular imaging, Cell tagging, Magnetic mediated drug delivery, Magnetic scaffolds, Magnetofection.