Cellular responses of aniline oligomers: a preliminary study

Abstract

The biomedical applications of aniline oligomers and their derivatives have attracted increasing interest due to their electroactive and biodegradable properties. However, no reports have systematically examined the toxicity of these electroactive materials, which has severely hindered their biomedical applications. In this work, the cellular responses of aniline oligomers including aniline dimer, trimer and tetramer to mouse embryo fibroblast (NIH-3T3) cells and adenocarcinomic human alveolar basal epithelial (A549) cells were determined and compared for the first time. Our results demonstrated that the aniline trimer showed the highest cytotoxicity to both types of cells. Compared with the NIH-3T3 cells, aniline oligomers exhibited the least cytotoxicity to A549 cells. Taken together, we demonstrate that both the properties of aniline oligomers and cell types could influence the cellular responses of aniline oligomers. As the first report focused on the cytotoxicity of aniline oligomers, this work provides some fundamental and important information about the cytotoxicity of aniline oligomers, which should be valuable for their biomedical applications.