During the first half-life of GIULIa project, first, we have established the workplan for ‘Data Organization Strategy’. Upon involvement of the GIULIa teams and my IIT group members, we have estimated for each of the WPs and tasks of GIULIa project the amount of data which will be collected. We have rationally defined the scheme to organize the collection of data, the storage and the preparation of rough data file to be added as supplementary materials for guarantee transparent research for the whole lifetime of GIULIa.
As a second objective, we have aimed at purchasing all the instrumentations accordingly to the assigned GIULIa project fundings. We have established a new Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) laboratory at the host institution, the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa-Italy, and we have conducted an international tender to purchase the MPI scanner which was finally installed in November 2024 (Figure 1A). This scanner has started to become central for many of ongoing WPs activities of GIULIa ERC project; we have started to perform some measurements on new magnetic materials developed and on magnetic loaded immune cells. We have also acquired a new magnetic hyperthermia device which will enable us to apply the alternated magnetic field, through a movable coil connected to a long arm, from the core of the device (Figure 1B) and which will be used for some magneto-optical characterization of our materials. We also bought a microfluidic device for continuous synthesis of building blocks (Figure 1C) and a microfluidic pump system (Figure 1D), which is capable to simulate the blood vessel/capillary flow on our magnetic microdevices or MNPs-loaded immune cells dispersed in the flow to study their behaviour (Figure 1C) under an optical/fluorescent microscope coupled with the magnetic hyperthermia devise of Figure 1B. Finally, we have also bought a sample positioner as an accessory for our Alternating Current (AC) magnetometer device (Figure 1E). This tool enables to automatically perform the AC magnetometer measurements of magnetic materials exposed to different environments or to perform long-term studies with multiple repetition of measurements of the same sample over prolonged time.
For the scientific specific task of the project, we have set a new protocol to engineering the natural killer (NK) cells with magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs), to be used as trojan horses to deliver, at the tumor. This protocol was studied on NK92 cells and NK cells extracted from healthy donor blood but also a T-cell line and is under investigation on CAR-NK cells. The whole collection of data has been used to file an Italian patent application (Application PT230732 of the 28/03/2024). In parallel, magnetic-heterostructure and plasmonic magnetic heterostructures have been developed as main building blocks for the development of magnetic microdevices to act as microrobot within this first period of GIULIa project. We have been focusing on synthesizing bimetallic dimers and tri-metallic dumbbell heterostructures featuring a magnetic core and gold-silver plasmonic domains and these synthesis conditions, set on bench protocol, are now under further development to obtain the same heterostructures under microfluidic conditions. We have developed a well-optimized, microwave-assisted Fe3O4 NCs synthesis process, which allowed us to produce highly monodisperse, well-crystalline structures in very short synthesis durations which is of the order of minutes (Wid Mekseriwattana et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202413514 ). These conditions are now under further implementation for an in-flow synthesis method for the continuous production of ferrite based nanocubes to be then used for the assembly of magnetic micro-device.
