Towards a Statistical Mechanics of Nanoparticle-Cell interactions

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• Prof. Huw Summers, Centre for Nanohealth, Swansea University
• Wednesday 30 May 2012, 16:00-17:00
• Watson Lecture Theatre C.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. G. Barreto.

Nanomedicine holds enormous promise for the diagnosis of disease and the direct intervention at molecular level for its treatment. However if therapeutic programmes using nanodrugs are to be successful we need to understand the multiple and complex processes that govern the uptake of nanoparticles into cells and their subsequent fate in the intra-cellular environment. Many of these processes are inherently stochastic and so quantitative description and prediction can only be done through statistical descriptors – nanoparticles are molecular scale objects and so are subject to the same random forces as molecules and thus require the same statistical mechanical approach to their analysis. In this talk I will present our work on the development of a statistical framework to describe quantum dot uptake and dispersion in tumour cell populations. Through imaging cytometry we are able to measure nanoparticle dose across thousands of cells and apply standard probability functions to describe the random uptake and partitioning of dots upon cell division; both processes can be viewed as a sequence of Bernoulli trials. Our results confirm that indeed at the single cell level the nanoparticle dose is random but also provide absolute determination of dose at population level.

This talk is part of the Nanoscale Physics Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Bham Talks
• Nanoscale Physics Seminars
• Watson Lecture Theatre C

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