ABOUT

The group is focused on drug delivery systems, with special attention on nanotechnology, and their application to the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields. The group is interested in engineering nanomedicines by identifying novel biological targets, proposing new functional ligands and producing tailored nanoplatforms for the delivery of therapeutic molecules for managing cancer, diabetes, infection and inflammatory diseases.

RESEARCH

Our scientific achievements share the keywords of drug delivery, nanomedicine, targeted and multifunctional nanoparticles, 3D cellular models, mucosal delivery, biopharmaceuticals, cancer, diabetes and infection.
Our specific lines of research focus on:

Advanced biomaterials - Characterize and validate functionalized biomaterials for drug delivery, tissue engineering and regeneration applications. Our focus is on functionalized polymers with active ligand moieties to target biological receptors.

Scalable nanofabrication - Establish functionalized multifunctional nanoparticles with efficient biofunctional moieties that target specific receptors, using biomaterials and translatable nanofabrication methods, considering cellular and molecular bioengineering concepts. The group contributed to the development of novel nanoformulations for small molecules, biomacromolecules and biopharmaceuticals.

Reliable 3D cell-based models - Set up 3D in vitro cell-based models and organ-on-a-chip platforms, closely resembling the basic characteristics of healthy and injured tissues, with special emphasis on intestinal, pulmonary tissues and tumors. These models allow to identify mechanisms of drug and nanoparticle absorption and correlate with in vivo extrapolation and validation.

Pre-clinical in vivo assessment - Monitor in real-time in vivo efficacy of therapeutic nanomedicines in animal models and generate patented nanotechnology that can be translated to delivery of many types of drugs able to enter clinical trials. Diabetes, gastrointestinal cancers and infectious are the prioritized areas of interest.

We are driven to embrace the transdisciplinary character of i3S and internally establish effective collaborations to foster synergies and common research interests, shared supervisions and joined research projects and scientific technology. We pursue international visibility of i3S through the achievement of excellence in research, the establishment of collaborations with world leaders in complementary scientific areas and deliver technologies to biomedical and pharmaceutical companies.

The group has attracted direct competitive national funding worth more than 15 M€ at national and international levels. The group published more than 450 papers in scientific journals, generated patented nanotechnology-based solutions that can be readily translated into clinical testing and established an extensive network of national and international collaborators.

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