Monitoring of the aging of magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications

Magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) made of magnetite have good magnetic characteristics, due to their high saturation magnetisation and can be prepared by the co-precipitation of iron salts. In this work we show that magnetite MNP change their magnetic and chemical characteristics over time when exposed to air. This finding is crucial for the quality control of the MNP and for the prediction algorithms used in magnetic drug targeting (MDT) to determine the maximal accumulation of the therapeutic agent at the target site.