Silver Nanoparticles Interactions with the Immune System: Implications for Health and Disease

Our immune system constantly interacts with our internal environment, protects us from our external environment and provides the inherent knowledge to sense the difference between friend and foe with important implications in human health and disease (Pozo, 2008). For these reasons, it is important to identify functional alteration of key immune responses as the number of silver nano-enabled products grows while the current data strongly suggest that other related nanomaterials, such as polymer nanoparticles, fullerenes, dendrimers and gold nanoparticles, interact with the immune system.