In recent decades, medicine has achieved important advances in the treatment of the most serious pathologies, such as cancer, neurodegenerative and metabolic disorders, as well as viral diseases. However, further efforts are needed to make the diagnoses offered to patients ever more precocious and predictive and the proposed therapies ever more precise, personalized and effective. Personalized medicine is therefore a need to be filled even today and many highly complex and different pathologies from patient to patient, such as cancer and neurodegenerative disorders, can only benefit from further scientific advances based on the use of highly engineered and multifunctional nanosystems. In this field of nanomedicine, multidisciplinary skills are fundamental, which combine chemical-physical and materials science skills with latest generation biological and biotechnological approaches.
In the context of the PhD in Chemical Engineering, the challenge of designing multifunctional and teranositic nanoparticles is faced, with methods that provide for their formulation by combining solid-state materials, polymers and biomolecules such as proteins and phospholipids. Furthermore, the chemical-physical characterization of the prepared nanomaterials, their unconventional properties, the aspects related to their stability and biodegradation in biological environment are widely taken into consideration. Finally, the evaluation of nanomaterials suitable for carrying out diagnosis and/or therapy directly on in vitro cell cultures is of fundamental importance (considering, for example, related to cancer, from the monolayer of cells in 2D up to spheroids and tumoroids in 3D, and microfluidic systems for organ-on-chip).