Fluorescent and superparamagnetic hybrid quantum clusters for magnetic separation and imaging of cancer cells from blood

We demonstrate here the generation of fluorescent superparamagnetic quantum clusters through a greener aqueous route by fusing highly fluorescent gold clusters with superparamagnetic nanoparticles. We conjugated transferrin onto the hybrid clusters to get cell accessibility and assessed their hemocompatibility and cytotoxicity. The ability of the clusters to selectively remove cancer cell lines (C6 glioma cells) from fluids including blood and the fluorescent imaging of the separated cells is demonstrated. The pattering of the clusters in response to an external magnetic field is also shown. Efficient cancer cell separation, imaging and magnetic pattering can be realized by the highly hemocompatible and noncytotoxic hybrid clusters reported here. It seems the probe has potential for further exploration in multimodal imaging of circulating cancer cells.