Abstract

In the last decade nanotechnologies have greatly developed in many research fields such as engineering, electronic, biological and many others. They can offer several possibilities to design tools, to create new techniques or improve the already existing ones, to discover innovative applications. And nanotechonology research is just at the beginning. One of the most interesting thing of this topic is the size of nanostructures. These materials are thousand times smaller than a cell and have a compatible size with proteins, enzymes and a lot of biological molecules. For this reason many research groups specialized in biotechnology started to invest people and resources in this new scientific possibility. Following this very promising trend, BIOtech, a research group for biotechnology at the University of Trento, has proposed the Nanosmart project. Developed together with many prestigious institutes all over the world, this project aims to exploit the nanotechnology possibilities in biological research. The purpose of this challenge is the design, development and production of magnetic nanoparticles to use them in diagnostics and therapy of cancer disease. Magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) are spherical agglomerates of iron oxide, few tens of nanometers, which can be exploited in many ways. Being magnetic they can be used as contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging MRI. Together having a high absorbing coefficient in the radio frequency band, they can locally increase the temperature of the tissues hosts and this being used for hyperthermia treatments. Entrapping some drugs in one of their multilayers, MNP can be used as inert carriers for drug delivery: due to their small size they can enter biological tissues, cross the plasma membrane of cells and release the drug only on predetermined targets. My Ph.D. started together with the project; so I had the possibility to follow this research from the beginning. In this years many problems have been handled, many errors have been made, many brilliant ideas have been shelved but also new abilities have been acquired, important collaborations were born and alternative structures have been thought and, fortunately, realized. Trying to eliminate unnecessary things and focusing on main purpose of this work, in this thesis I want to illustrate just the long “fil rouge” that connects the idea of producing a nanoparticle that can cure tumor to the point of verify its effectiveness.