Assessment of cellular toxicity of TiO₂ nanoparticles for cardiac tissue engineering applications

Abstract

Because of the increased use of titanium dioxide (TiO₂) nanoparticles (NPs) in tissue engineering (TE), and in new constructs for cardiac TE, their effect was studied on three relevant cell types: Adult rat ventricular cardiomyocytes, human embryonic stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hESC-CM) and fibroblasts. For adult rat myocytes, 10 μg/mL TiO₂ NPs showed no significant effect on myocyte survival over 24 h or acute myocyte contractility. Increasing the concentration to 100 μg/mL was seen to reduce contraction amplitude (p < 0.05). For hESC-CM, 10 μg/mL TiO₂ reduced the beating rate significantly by 24 h. No arrhythmias or cessation of beating were observed in either cell type. Culturing fibroblasts in 5–150 μg/mL TiO₂ significantly reduced cell proliferation at day 4 and increased cell death. We conclude that there may be modest but potentially adverse effects of TiO₂ NPs if used in fast degrading polymers for myocardial tissue engineering (MTE) applications.

Keywords::

• Titanium dioxide
• nanoparticles
• cardiomyocytes
• toxicity and tissue engineering

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Prof. Terry Tetley for help and advice.

Declaration of interest: The authors acknowledge financial support from BBSRC and EPSRC (UK Research Councils, grant number BB/D011027/1). The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.