Iron oxide nanoparticle decorated Graphene oxide nanocomposites for MRI Contrast Agents and its flow behavior

Graphene oxide (GO) has been extensively studied for a variety of applications ranging from sensing, drug delivery, tissue imaging, gene targeting to therapeutics. Low elemental toxicity combined with water solubility and presence of surface oxygen functional groups render GO suspensions as attractive precursor materials for producing theranostics platforms. In this work, both chemical and geometrical variants were synthesized for cancer diagnosis and theranostics platforms. The chemical GO variants are produced via in-situ nanoparticle decoration of GO sheets. The geometrical GO variants are obtained in mesoscale particle size range from precursor GO sheets by utilization of a hybrid and facile solution processable synthesis protocol developed during prior work. GO nanocomposites decorated with iron oxide nanoparticles synthesized and tested during this work have shown promising results for their applicability as MRI contrast agents. Moreover, studies capturing flow movies of geometrical variants of GO nanocomposites provide evidence for particle margination towards channel wall suggesting potential of these nanocomposites in passive cancer targeting thus contributes towards development of smart multi-functional GO-based theranostics platform.