Descripción del proyecto
Laboratorio en un chip para la caracterización de fármacos
Muchos compuestos químicos, incluidos los productos farmacéuticos, poseen una propiedad geométrica conocida como quiralidad, es decir, presentan dos formas que son imágenes especulares entre sí. Aunque las moléculas quirales tienen la misma estructura química, su efecto biológico es diferente. Este factor debe tenerse en cuenta en el desarrollo farmacéutico para evitar la biotoxicidad. En este contexto, el equipo del proyecto TwistedNano, financiado con fondos europeos, desarrollará un nuevo dispositivo basado en la espectroscopia que permite identificar la naturaleza quiral de los fármacos durante su descubrimiento. A pesar de usar cantidades mínimas de muestra, el chip microfluídico tendrá una gran sensibilidad y velocidad en la detección de quiralidad, lo que en último término mejorará los esfuerzos de investigación y desarrollo de nuevos fármacos.
Objetivo
The quest for new medical drugs demands reliable, ultrasensitive and fast techniques to identify, refine and test small volumes of candidates for clinical trials. The efficacy of pharmaceuticals depends to a large extent on their chiral composition, and thus enantiomeric purity and selectivity is an important issue for the development of new drugs and to test their biotoxicity. TwistedNano addresses this need with a new generation of integrated nanophotonic devices enabling ultrasensitive chiroptical spectroscopy of sub-nanolitre volumes, revolutionizing at-source the sensing technological toolbox for drug discovery and nanomedicine.
Because of governmental regulations, agencies require pharmaceutical manufacturers to investigate systematically most of drug enantiomers to determine their safety/efficacy. Thus, the development of fast, compact and accurate chiral sensing on a chip is one of the current primary targets of the nanomedicine industry, constituting a growing market that is already exceeding 100 billion Euros. TwistedNano will result in a photonics-enabled chiral sensing technology that integrates vectorial structured light fields with almost arbitrary control onto a microfluidic chip, providing groundbreaking advantages compared to current instrumentation: (i) remote/distributed analysis, (ii) reduced sample consumption, (iii) cost reduction, (iv) parallelization, (v) increased diagnostic speed and sensitivity.
Key elements developed for optofluidic integration include photonic crystal fibers, photonic nanostructures, and metasurfaces operating in close synergy with cutting-edge chiroptical spectroscopic techniques. In the mid-term, TwistedNano will not only lay the foundations of a new lab-on-chip chiral sensing technology revolutionizing drug discovery, theranostics and nanomedicine, but also open a plethora of disruptive applications such as characterization of minute amounts of viruses and macromolecules in general.
Ámbito científico
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacydrug discovery
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugs
- engineering and technologyother engineering and technologiesmicrotechnologylab on a chip
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologynanomedicine
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynanophotonics
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Convocatoria de propuestas
HORIZON-EIC-2021-PATHFINDEROPEN-01
Consulte otros proyectos de esta convocatoriaRégimen de financiación
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinador
67100 L Aquila
Italia