Despite undeniable advances in medicine in recent decades,
cancer is still one of the main challenges faced by scientists and professionals in the health sciences as it remains one of the world's most devastating diseases with millions of fatalities and new cases every year. Thus, in this work, we endeavored to synthesize and characterize novel multifunctional
immunoconjugates composed of
quantum dots (QDs) as the fluorescent inorganic core and antibody-modified
polysaccharide as the organic shell, focusing on their potential applications for in vitro diagnosis of
non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL)
cancer tumors.
Chitosan was covalently conjugated with anti-CD20 polyclonal antibody (pAbCD20) via formation of
amide bonds between
amines and carboxyl groups. In the sequence, these
biopolymer-antibody
immunoconjugates were utilized as direct capping
ligands for biofunctionalization of CdS QDs (CdS/
chitosan-pAbCD20) using a single-step process in aqueous medium at room temperature. The nanostructures were characterized by UV-vis spectroscopy, photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL), FTIR, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) with selected area electron diffraction. The TEM images associated with the UV-vis optical absorption results indicated formation of ultrasmall nanocrystals with average diameters in the range of 2.5-3.0 nm. Also, the PL results demonstrated that the
immunoconjugates exhibited "green" fluorescent activity under ultraviolet excitation. Moreover, using in vitro
laser light scattering immunoassay (LIA), the QDs/
immunoconjugates have shown binding affinity against
antigen CD20 (aCD20) expressed by lymphocyte-B
cancer cells. In summary, innovative fluorescent nanoimmunoconjugate templates were developed with promising perspectives to be used in the future for detection and imaging of
cancer tumors.