Bladder cancer presents one of the most frequently occurring cancers in developed countries with a high risk of recurrence. It is normally treated with transurothelial tumour resection and chemotherapy or irradiation, but several fomrulations of nanoparticles have also been proposed for targeted treatment of urothelial cancer. In this paper, we showed that selective targeting of cancer urothelial cells can also be achieved based on the considerably higher endocytic activity of cancer cells compared to healthy, differentiated urothelial cells, with really low endocytic activity. The difference in nanoparticle uptake was shown by spectrophotometric quantification of fluorescently labelled nanoparticles and with analysis of micrographs from the transmission electron microscope (TEM). The established technique for uptake quantification with TEM enables precise quantification of internalized nanoparticles since it enables us to distinguish internalized nanoparticles form nanoparticles caught in the intercellular space or attached to cell surface. since it does not depend on fluorescent labelling, it enables uptake quantification for all electron dense nanoparticles. Since most of industrial nanoparticles cannot be fluorescently labeled, this technique can also be used for uptake quantification of engineered nanoparticles into neural cells.
COBISS.SI-ID: 11794772