Description du projet
Un laboratoire sur puce pour la caractérisation pharmaceutique
De nombreux composés chimiques, dont les produits pharmaceutiques, présentent une propriété géométrique appelée chiralité, selon laquelle ils existent sous deux formes qui sont des images symétriques l’une de l’autre. Bien que les molécules chirales aient la même structure chimique, leur effet biologique est différent. Ce facteur doit être pris en considération dans le développement pharmaceutique, afin d’éviter tout risque de biotoxicité. Dans ce contexte, le projet TwistedNano financé par l’UE va concevoir un nouveau dispositif basé sur la spectroscopie capable d’identifier la nature chirale des médicaments en cours de développement. En dépit de l’utilisation de quantités infimes d’échantillons, la puce microfluidique fera preuve d’une sensibilité et d’une rapidité considérables dans la détection de la chiralité, faisant ainsi progresser les efforts de recherche et de développement de nouveaux médicaments.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
- 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
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Programme(s)
Régime de financement
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinateur
67100 L Aquila
Italie