Phd in INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT)

Thesis title: Electromagnetic fields and Nanosystems for Biomedical Applications

In the last decades, a growing attention has been risen in the development of nanotechnologies applied to biomedical applications, also defined nanomedicine. In fact, the great potentiality of nanomedicine lays in the possibility to design and develop nanosystems, that could overcome the heterogeneous biological barriers present inside the human body at different levels, from the systemic to the cellular level, thus providing a localized interaction with cell and intracellular organelles. Nanosystems can be designed and produced using a variety of materials and, thanks to the high surface-volume ratio and to the possibility to easily engineer their surfaces, they represent a flexible and multifunctional tool to interact with biological system up to the single cell level. Nanomedicine could address the need of the development of strategic patient-specific techniques, starting from the improvement of diagnostics and therapeutics techniques, specifically based on controlled drug delivery systems and tissue regeneration. To this regard, thanks to the ability of electromagnetic (EM) fields to interact with biological systems up to molecular level, and the possibility to be used from outside the body, this new nanomedicine challenge towards a personalized medicine can be achieved through the assessed use of EM fields, representing non-invasive and remote actuators. In this framework is placed this Ph.D. research project, whose aim is to provide the feasibility of using EM fields in a safe and non-invasive way as external stimuli, able to “on demand” control either biocompatible drug delivery nanosystems or cells for both drug delivery and tissue regeneration purposes, in accordance with the applied signal. This project is developed in a multidisciplinary manner, providing experimental and numerical investigations to achieve the required goals. The study is based on a multiscale and multiphysics approach, in order to study drug delivery treatments based on EM fields and regenerative tissue applications based on static electric field. Moreover, an effort on implementing numerical simulations considering the coupling of different physics to fully describe complex phenomena of interaction and the temporal multiscale of these processes has been provided. Finally, an accurate modelling of realistic structures at micro-nanoscale of cell and intracellular organelles and virions is proposed as a numerical tool to address challenges in therapeutics and diagnostic applications. The main outcomes will be useful to move forward on the assessed use of EM fields as non-invasive actuators for a remotely control of drug delivery nanosystems, tissue regeneration and cell and nanoscale organisms’ characterization.