Toxicity Patterns of Clinically Relevant Metal Oxide Nanoparticles.

Nanostructured drugs are being approved for clinical use, although there is a serious deficit of systematic studies of these materials. Data on toxicity of nanoparticles (NPs) can vary due to different methods of preparation, size, and shape. We investigated the toxicity against cultured human cells, the acute toxicity in mice, and the influence on conjugative transfer of antibiotic resistance genes of clinically relevant NPs such as TiO, ZrO, HfO, TaO, FeO, and AlOOH.