Nanotechnology (i.e. fabrication and study of properties of objects in the nanometer scale) has received widespread attention in the last several decades due to the technological breakthroughs it has enabled across sectors from electronics to medicine. Providing new nanomaterials with programmed and adaptive properties is one of the ingredients of future personalised medicine.
On the other hand, recent years have seen a tremendous shift of interested towards therapeutic treatments based on RNA/DNA technology (e.g. RNA vaccines, siRNA drugs, gene editing). The present project has the purpose to foster research enabling to join DNA/RNA technologies with the fabrication of functional nanostructures for future, more potent and more selective therapeutic agents which have proven applicability in curing most of the more important human diseases.
Towards the great challenges that nanotechnology arise, the Nano-OligoMed project had the ambition to establish and support a network of international collaboration, enabling a collaborative scientific team to effectively use a diversity of approaches and strategies to design, generate and test innovative nanomaterials for the efficient and safe systemic delivery of oligonucleotide (DNA/RNA or similar)-based therapeutic agents.
To this end, we have set-up a joint multidisciplinary scientific collaborative programme that through exchange, international mobility, and strongly collaborative transfer of knowledge and training activities between 4 European and 3 extra-European countries, brought together leading experts under the field of “nanomaterials in biomedicine”.
Nano-OligoMed allowed the creation of smart nanomaterials that can degrade and thus release a therapeutic cargo only in the presence of a specific molecular or chemical input. This is particularly important because often in cancer cells there is a local change of the chemical environment or an overexpression of a specific biomolecule/receptor. To achieve this objective Nano-OligoMed took advantage of the unique features of nucleic acids as responsive elements to be rationally inserted in the structural framework of the nanomaterial. The presence of DNA and artificial mimicks of nucleic acids as structural elements has allowed to functional materials with unique molecular features.
