Cell death is crucial to human health and is related to various serious diseases. Therefore, generation of new cell death regulators is urgently needed for disease treatment. Nanoparticles (NPs) are now routinely used in a variety of fields, including consumer products and medicine. Exhibiting stability and ease of decoration, gold nanoparticles (GNPs) could be used in diagnosis and disease treatment. Upon entering the human body, GNPs contact human cells in the blood, targeting organs and the immune system. This property results in the disturbance of cell function and even cell death. Therefore, GNPs may act as powerful cell death regulators. However, at present, we are far from establishing a structure-activity relationship between the physicochemical properties of GNPs and cell death, and predicting GNP-induced cell death. In this review, GNPs' size, shape, and surface properties are observed to play key roles in regulating various cell death modalities and related signaling pathways. These results could guide the design of GNPs for nanomedicine.
Keywords: apoptosis; autophagy; cell death; gold nanoparticles; necrosis; proliferation.