Ricerc@Sapienza

Immunotherapy is a powerful therapeutic approach able to re-educate the immune system to fight cancer. A key player in this process is the tumor microenvironment (TME), which is a dynamic entity characterized by a complex array of tumor and stromal cells as well as immune cell populations trafficking to the tumor site through the endothelial barrier.

During the past three decades, due to the development of new technologies that allow faster and more accurate virological diagnoses, clinical virology laboratory has taken on an important role in the patient’s clinical management. Besides, it is now possible to define, more quickly and precisely than before, viral gene sequences related to specific viral variants (including drug-resistant strains) or to viral and host factors that can affect the natural history of infections.

The chemical treatment called “chemotherapy of plants” consists in the in vivo administration of substances able to interfere with viral replication. The current availability of synthetic molecules with a high chemotherapeutic index, i.e. with a high ratio between the maximum concentration tolerated and the minimum effective, together with the possibility to further widen the therapeutic window by the use of appropriate nanocarriers, seems to open on the application level of a novel chemical approach to treat plant viral infections.

This contribution deals with a foam templating route to produce solid monodisperse chitosan foams via microfluidics. We firstly produced a monodisperse liquid foam from a 4 wt % chitosan solution. Subsequently, we cross-linked the chitosan with genipin and freeze-dried the resulting monodisperse foamed hydrogel to obtain solid monodisperse chitosan foams. In order to obtain a desired polydispersity we also used microfluidics, i.e. we produced polydisperse foams with a controlled bubble size distribution by applying a periodic pressure to the gas phase.

Injection of cell-laden scaffolds in the form of mesoscopic particles directly to the site of treatment is one of the most promising approaches to tissue regeneration. Here, we present a novel and highly efficient method for preparation of porous microbeads of tailorable dimensions (in the range ~ 300-1500 mm) and with a uniform and fully interconnected internal porous texture. The method starts with generation of a monodisperse oil-in-water emulsion inside a flow-focusing microfluidic device.

Tailoring the morphology of macroporous structures remains one of the biggest challengesin material synthesis. Here, we present an innovative approach to fabricatecustommacroporous materials with pore size varying throughout the structure by up to an order of magnitudeusingon-demand reconfigurable microfluidics. We employavalve-based flow-focusing junction(vFF)in which the size of the orifice can be adjusted in real-time (within tens of milliseconds)to generate foams withon-linecontrolled bubble size.

Nowadays, 3D bioprinting technologies are rapidly emerging in the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine as effective tools enabling the fabrication of advanced tissue constructs that can recapitulate in vitro organ/tissue functions. Selecting the best strategy for bioink deposition is often challenging and time consuming process, as bioink properties-in the first instance, rheological and gelation-strongly influence the suitable paradigms for its deposition.

In tissue engineering practice, a scaffold is often needed to deliver cells to the desired body site needing to be repaired. Scaffolds supporting cells can be either implanted through a surgical operation or injected through a laparoscopic device. The latter option is a first-choice in cases where a small and irregularly shaped defect needs to be regenerated. In such circumstances, the cell carrier has to be miniaturised while maintaining the morphological features that make a scaffold an efficient cell culture support, i.e.

In the last years, many studies on absorption and cell uptake of nanoparticles by plants have been conducted, but the understanding of the internalization mechanisms is still largely unknown.

Lab-on-Chip are miniaturized systems able to perform biomolecular analysis in shorter time and with lower reagent consumption than a standard laboratory. Their miniaturization interferes with the multiple functions that the biochemical procedures require. In order to address this issue, our paper presents, for the first time, the integration on a single glass substrate of different thin film technologies in order to develop a multifunctional platform suitable for on-chip thermal treatments and on-chip detection of biomolecules.