Nanotechnology approach for diminishing quercetin toxicity toward peripheral blood mononuclear cells

Abstract

Quercetin (Q) is one of the most common and well researched antioxidant flavonoids, which usually occurs in plant-based foods, and medicinal plants. It was shown that quercetin exerts many beneficial effects on human health, including prevention of cancer and heart diseases. Quercetin was found to be toxic toward various types of cancer cell, still, at higher concentrations it was also shown toxic toward normal human cells [1,2]. One of the approaches to overcome this shortcoming offers nanotechnology which enables the novel perspective of phytochemical usage in contemporary medicine [3]. The strategy of binding quercetin to the gold nanoparticles during their synthesis was used, which resulted in quercetin capped gold nanoparticles (NPQ) [4]. Trypan blue exclusion test [5] was used to evaluate peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) viability after their exposure to either NPQ or free Q during 24, 48 and 72 h, at 37 °C, in the range of quercetin concentrations from 5 to 50 μg/mL. A significant reduction in the cell count was observed in PBMC cultures treated with 10, 20, and 50 μg/mL of free Q, for all exposure times. The treatments of increasing concentrations and exposure times lowered the cells viability, resulting in 63% of the viable cells, following 72 h of the treatment with 50 μg/mL of free Q. Although NPQ treatments affected the cells viability in a concentration- and time-dependent manner the treatment with 50 μg/mL of NPQ for 72 h, had a milder effect on PBMC cultures than free Q, resulting in 81% of the viable cells (Figure 1). According to the obtained results, NPQ were shown less toxic toward PBMC than free Q.1-EuSPMF - 1st European Symposium on Phytochemicals in Medicine and Food; 7-9 September, 2022; Belgrad