Ricerc@Sapienza

Nanoparticles (NPs) provide significant benefits to medicine. Targeting of their action site, delivery, and reduction of intrinsic toxicity still remain challenging. Here focus is on the preparation and characterization of bio-inspired and biomimetic hybrid nano-materials. These have unique features in terms of size, surface area, chemical composition, solubility and local morphology. Perspectives are in biomedicine and transfection technologies, although potential hazard to humans must has to be accounted for.
The design of multi-functional hybrids, either "soft" or "hard", may improve current formulations and reduce some inherent drawbacks. The proposed bottom-up strategy provide peculiar structural arrangements for self-complementing NPs complement in hybrids. Their clustering induces outstanding features and performances not occurring in the original form. The size, morphology and physico-chemical properties of NPs can be tuned by suitable chemical functionalization, introducing sensitivity to temperature, pH, or ionic strength.
The complex architectures considered here are:
1. cat-anionic vesicles surface-decorated with proteins or nucleic acids
2. DNA- or RNA-wrapped carbon nanotubes (CNTs)
3. dispersion of nucleic acids-wrapped CNTs in vesicular media
4. lipopeptides with pH and/or temperature-dependent association features
5. pH and thermosensitive peptide-polymer conjugates
6- internalizing magnetic NPs in vesicles/liposomes
Complementary experimental methods, such as dynamic light scattering, atomic force and electron microscopies, NMR, circular dichroism, fluorescence, electrophoretic mobility, relaxation spectroscopies will help optimizing size, shape, charge and hydrophobicity of nano-hybrids. Attention is focused on the control of surface potentials and surface coverage, which induce interactions among NPs and favor the formation of the desired hybrids. Finally, the toxicity of the most promising materials will be assessed.