Long-term nanobiotechnology goal: The long-range goal of Carbo-IMmap is to develop a functional pipeline for the immune-characterization of carbon nanomaterials, for the qualitative and quantitative assessment in vitro and ex vivo of the human immune compatibility and immune activity of newly developed carbon materials.
Long-term nanomedical goal: The functional pipeline will be used for the accurate immune mapping of graphene oxide, aminated graphene, exfoliated graphene, graphene nanoribbons, functionalized carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotube fibers. The accurate immuno-characterization of the tested materials on the basis of intrinsic physical-chemical features and immunological properties will open breakthrough perspectives for the development of new therapeutic approaches applying nanomaterials as immunomodulators, immunotherapetutic agents, molecular vectors and scaffolds for tissue regeneration/engineering.
Key implementation aspects: The innovative pipeline will ground on computational modelling systems to predict the materials behaviours in the biological fluids and their interaction with biomolecules. The modelling strategy will be coupled with a wide array of high throughput assays based on immune-phenotypic and immune-genomics analysis providing the simultaneous detection of multiple effects on the five major immune cell populations and ex vivo on the highly complex immune blood cell pool. The combination of the most innovative technologies (12-colour Flow cytometry, ImageStream, CyTOF, single cell gene expression), allowing multiplex analysis of many cell types, will provide a forefront approach to investigate the immune impact.
Scientific impact: The successful development and optimization of the functional pipeline for the characterization of the immune activity of newly synthesized, stable carbon nanomaterials will greatly advance the engineering process of carbon nanomaterials. The implication of this project extend beyond the specific nanoscience program. The unprecedented testing of 5 different types of materials to assess jointly the effect of different parameters (such as size and chemical functionalization) on all major type of immune blood cells, is a step ahead in basic research attempting to predict nanomaterial immune activity and to take advantage of their potential immunomodulation feature.
