Chirality – the lack of symmetry upon reflection – is ubiquitous in our universe and plays a central role in most of physical and chemical processes. Molecules with opposite handedness – enantiomers – albeit being composed by identical physical constituents, frequently exhibit marked differences in biological activities. In the particular case of pharmaceutics, the specific enantiomeric form affects their functionality, as in particular pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics and toxicity.
Just as oil fuelled the industrial age, nanotechnologies are fuelling advances of a new health revolution for diagnosis, therapy and new products provided to society by key emerging industries in nanomedicine. The quest of the concealed elusive molecule for treating a disease involves a constant screening, which relies heavily on the technological toolbox for handling small liquid volumes, automation, and high-throughput processing and analysis. At present, the landscape of the so-called "lab-on-a-chip" (LOC) devices is a driving force for
innovation in pharmaceutics, nanomedicine and biochemical industry, becoming a key driver for many markets. LOC devices enable advanced point-of-care diagnostics, drug screening and clinical trials by fast, compact, sensitive, and easy-to-use tools with a high level of functional integration. Integration of chiral sensing in LOC microfluidics plays a crucial role to ignite a paradigm shift in drug discovery and nanomedicine, constantly relying on chiral characterization of drug enantiomers, tracers, nano-platforms, contrast agents to optimize biological tissue penetration and the treatment efficacy/security. Indeed, drug development timescales depend heavily on the chiral technological toolbox exploited for determining the enantiomer absolute configuration (AC) and purity.
TwistedNano targets the EU priority area “Health and Safety” by developing a set of new-generation ultrasensitive LOC-integrable photonic sensors of chiral drugs. The envisaged optical technologies, capable of measuring AC and enantiomeric purity, will revolutionize at-source the sensing technological toolbox for drug discovery and nanomedicine. The envisioned devices will provide radically new and advanced capabilities for (i) remote and distributed analysis, (ii) reduced sample consumption, (iii) cost reduction, (iv) parallelization, (v) increased speed and sensitivity, crucial for fast clinical trials.
