IMMUNOCOMPATIBILITY AND BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS OF NEW NANOMATERIALS

Nanomaterial’s properties can be exploited for diagnostic and medical purposes or combined and fine-tuned to obtain multimodal nanoplatforms available for theranostics. For instance, independently from the specific nanomedicine goal, these nanomaterials will immediately contact the organism immune cells, as body’s first defensive barrier. Therefore, a critical step for future translational applications is represented by the assessment of nanomaterial’s impact on the immune system. In this view, the nanoimmunity-by-design concept is the leitmotiv of the Ph.D. project, it consists in the characterization of graphene and other nanomaterials not only from a chemical-physical point of view but also based on the effects that can occur towards the immune system. To pursue this goal, a new experimental model based on human primary immune cell populations, in particular on red blood cells (RBCs) and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) that can be adopted for the immune assessment of a large number of nanomaterials, was developed. To achieve this purpose, the Ph.D. project focused on the immunological characterization of some of the main promising nanomaterials for biomedical applications: carbon nanodots, ultrasmall silica nanoparticles, graphene-oxide-based hydrogels, titanium-based transition metal carbides, and polystyrene nanoparticles, adopting single- cell level techniques (i.e. flow cytometry and single-cell mass cytometry)