Cancer is one of the most common diseases nowadays and derives from the uncontrollable growth of a single cell. Magnetic nanoparticles (NpMag) offer various possibilities for use in the biomedical area, including drug delivery mediated by magnetic fields. In the current study, we evaluated the in vitro effects of iron-oxide magnetic nanoparticles conjugated with the antitumor drug doxorubicin (Dox) on human breast cancer cells. Our results revealed that magnetic nanoparticles with Dox (NpMag+Dox) induce cellular redox imbalance in MCF-7 cells. We also demonstrate that iron-oxide nanoparticles functionalized with Dox induce oxidative stress evidenced by DNA damage, lipid peroxidation, cell membrane disruption, and loss of mitochondria potential. As a result, NpMag+Dox drives MCF-7 cells to stop the cell cycle and decrease cell migration. The association of NpMg+Dox induced a better delivery of Dox to MCF cells, mainly in the presence of a magnetic field, increasing the death of MCF cells which might reduce the toxicity for healthy cells providing a better efficacy for the treatment. Thus, iron-oxide nanoparticles and doxorubicin conjugated may be candidate for anticancer therapy.

In this paper structural, electric, magnetic, and Mössbauer spectroscopy studies were conducted in (x)BiFeO₃–(1-x)BaTiO₃, 0.9 ≥ x ≥ 0.3, solid solutions. X-ray diffraction and Rietveld refinement studies indicated the formation of single-phased materials crystallized in a distorted perovskite structure with the coexistence of rhombohedral and monoclinic symmetries. Room temperature ferroelectric hysteresis loops showed that the electric polarization increases with the increase of the BaTiO₃ content due to the singular structural evolution of the studied solid solutions. All samples presented weak ferromagnetic ordering, which indicates that the BaTiO₃ substitution in the BiFeO₃ matrix released the latent magnetization. Mössbauer studies revealed a magnetic spectral signature corresponding to ordered Fe³⁺ ions, and a decrease of the magnetic hyperfine magnetic fields with the increase of the BaTiO₃ content. The composition 0.3BiFeO₃–0.7BaTiO₃ presented a spectral signature corresponding to a paramagnetic behavior, which strongly suggests that the observed magnetization in this sample is due to the Ti³⁺ ions.

A magnetically controlled elastically driven electroporation phenomenon, or magneto-elasto-electroporation (MEEP), is discovered while studying the interactions between core-shell magnetoelectric nanoparticles (CSMEN) and biological cells in the presence of an a.c. magnetic field. In this paper we report the effect of MEEP observed via a series of in-vitro experiments using core (CoFe₂O₄)-shell (BaTiO₃) structured magnetoelectric nanoparticles and human epithelial cells (HEP2). The cell electroporation phenomenon and its correlation with the magnetic field modulated CSMEN are described in detail. The potential application of CSMEN in electroporation is confirmed by analyzing crystallographic phases, multiferroic properties of the fabricated CSMEN, influences of d.c. and a.c. magnetic fields on the CSMEN and cytotoxicity tests. The mathematical formalism to quantitatively describe the phenomena is also reported. The reported findings provide insights into the underlying MEEP mechanism and demonstrate the utility of CSMEN as an electric pulse-generating nano-probe in electroporation experiments with a potential application toward accurate and efficient targeted cell permeation.

Chemically synthesized magnetite and poly(thiophene)-coated magnetite nanoparticles and the correlations between their magnetic, structural, and microstructural properties are investigated. A typical superparamagnetic behavior was observed for faceted nanoparticle agglomerates of magnetite and nanocomposite. In nanocomposites, the polymer layer causes a sharp decrease in the spin disorder, which reduces the anisotropy constant significantly. This happens because the intimate contact between magnetite and poly(thiophene) leads to charge transfer from the polymer to the core via polaron interactions, causing a structural rearrangement of the nanoparticles and suppression of the spin movement at the surface. As this dynamic interaction can tune the core dimensions, the magnetic properties of nanocomposites can be tuned by controlling the core size through polymer coating. These characteristics can be exploited to design high-performance magnetically tunable nanodevices and applied in many areas of biomedicine (DNA separation, drug targeting, immune detection, and magnetic nanoparticle hyperthermia in cancer treatment).