Evaluation of cytocompatibility and cell response to boron nitride nanotubes.

While in the last years applications of carbon nanotubes in the field of biotechnology have been largely proposed, so far biomedical applications of boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) are still totally unexplored. BNNTs show very interesting physical properties that might be exploited in the nanomedicine field. To fill up the lack of biocompatibility studies on BNNTs, our group has recently begun a rational investigation on interactions between BNNTs and different cell lines. This chapter reports on preliminary cytocompatibility studies carried out on human neuroblastoma (SH-SY5Y) and on mouse myoblast (C2C12) cell lines as model of neural and skeletal muscle cells, respectively, highlighting the methods that allowed us to evaluate the main parameters of interests for cytocompatibility, such as cell viability, metabolism, apoptosis, and differentiation.