Supervisor: Valentina Cauda
The PhD candidate will be primarily involved in a European Research project (the ERC Starting Grant project “TrojaNanoHorse”) of Prof. Valentina Cauda. This project aims at the development of a new nanotechnology-based therapy for treating cancers and for the related bio-imaging. The therapy is based on the delivering of nanosized particles, i.e. semiconductor metal oxide nanocrystals (NCs), functionalized with patient-derived lipid vesicles and their subsequent activation by ultrasonic irradiation in the tumor region, leading to cancer-cells killing. The role of the PhD candidate in this project will be to study and optimize the ultrasound (US)-induced activation of the nanocrystals to both generate free radicals and damages inside cancer cells also to work as contrast agent for bio-imaging purposes.
The PhD candidate will help the research team in developing the ultrasound apparatus to stimulate the nanodevice and acquire the imaging signal. A deep knowledge of the physical mechanism at the base of the ultrasound activation will be the focus of the study as well as the semiconductor material properties and finally the biological processes. In this context, the PhD candidate will be inserted in a highly-multidisciplinary research group, consisting of Physicists, Engineers, Chemists and Biologists and accompanied step by step both in a deep literature review about the ultrasound-based therapies for cancer treatment and also on the highly-committed experimental work in the lab where several investigation techniques will be exploited. Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectroscopy to investigate the radical generation, B-Mode ultrasonograpy, passive cavitation detection to understand the ultrasound activation mechanisms will be used, as well as fluorescence microscopy even with living cancer cells for the in-vitro testing of NCs for cancer cell therapy.
More extensive info can be obtained contacting prof. Valentina Cauda and visiting the TNHlab web page.