Tu229 - Two-dimensional Materials for Biomedical Applications: MXenes Immune Profiling

Two-dimensional (2D) transition metal carbides/carbonitrides (MXenes) are rapidly growing as nanoplatforms in biomedicine. Considering the central importance of the immune response for any clinical translation of nanomaterials, we evaluated the effects on human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of three MXenes: Mo₂Ti₂C_3, Nb₄C_3, and Ta₄C₃.

We assessed immune cell functionality by measuring 40 cytokines by Luminex technology. The materials exhibited only a slight modulation on the inflammatory mediators analyzed. Next, we investigated their effects on PBMC by mRNA sequencing. By performing principal component analysis on all analyzed transcripts (N=19,959), we found that MXene-treated samples clustered close to the controls, and separately from concanavalin A (ConA)- and lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-treated samples, thus indicating that only minimal perturbations were induced by the materials. Overall, we did not observe genome-wide changes induced by MXenes. All materials showed modest effects on PBMCs, modulating the expression of fewer genes than the positive controls ConA and LPS. In particular, even if all materials had similar effects on gene expression modulation, Ta₄C₃ had slightly greater effects than Mo₂Ti₂C₃ and Nb₄C₃. The expression of 142, 46, and 83 genes was modulated by Ta₄C₃, Mo₂Ti₂C₃, and Nb₄C₃, respectively, whereas the positive controls ConA and LPS modulated the expression of 4,340 and 710 genes, respectively. Furthermore, pathway-enrichment analyses on genes coherently modulated by the materials showed only modest enrichment of immune-related pathways without a clear indication of activation or inhibition.

Our results provide a compendium of knowledge on the biocompatibility of MXenes for the safe development of nanosystems in biomedicine.