Gold Nanoprobes Facilitate Stem Cell Therapies

Stem cell therapy is in its infancy, but has the potential to change the way we treat cancer and other life-threatening diseases, by replacing damaged or diseased cells with healthy ones. One of the key limitations of stem cell therapy is identifying the right cells to use for different therapies. Sumeet Mahajan, from the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), and colleagues have utilized a technique discovered at the University in the 1970s, known as Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS), which is based on the premise of roughening a metal surface upon which molecules are placed to be examined, thereby increasing the signal by which they could detect these molecules, by a million times.  In this new application, SERS enables scientists to look at adult stem cells on a molecular scale to distinguish one from another. The study authors submit that: “Our approach using nuclear-targeted [gold nanoparticles] and [Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy] imaging provides label-free and noninvasive characterization that can play a vital role in identifying cell types in biomedical stem cell research.