Houshang Amiri1,
2, Morteza Mahmoudi3, 4, Jolanda de Vries2,
Arend Heerschap1, Alessandro Lascialfari5
1Radiology
Department, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Nijmegen, Gelderland,
Netherlands; 2Tumor Immunology Department, Nijmegen Centre for
Molecular Life Sciences, Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands; 3Nanotechnology
Research Centre, Faculty of Pharmacy, Tehran University of Medical Sciences,
Tehran, Iran; 4Pasteur Institute of Iran, Tehran, Iran; 5Physics
Department, Milan University, Milan, Lombardia, Italy
To investigate the effects of a protein corona (PC) on MRI contrast efficiency of superparamagnetic iron oxide NPs (SPIONs), we synthesized two series of SPIONs with various thickness and functional groups of the dextran surface coating. 1H longitudinal and transverse relaxivities of the SPIONs as a function of the Larmor frequency were obtained. Transverse relaxivity was dependent on the functional group of the SPIONs. The presence of the PC did slightly increased the relaxivity of the negatively charged SPIONs and dramatically decreased it for positively charged ones. in vitro MRI experiments at were in full agreement with the relaxometry findings.