Issues in Nanosafety and Nanomedicine
DIPC Seminars
- Speaker
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Giancarlo Franzese, Departament de Física Fonamental, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona
- When
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2012/06/15
12:30 - Place
- Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC).Paseo Manuel de Lardizabal, 4 (nearby the Facultad de Quimica), Donostia
- Add to calendar
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“Issues in Nanosafety and Nanomedicine"
Prof. Giancarlo Franzese
Departament de Física Fonamental, Facultat de Física, Universitat de
Barcelona, Av. Diagonal 647, 08028 Barcelona, Spain.
E-mail: [gfranzese@ub.edu](mailto:gfranzese@ub.edu)
Abstract.
Nanomedicine (and Nanodiagnostics) recognize the capacity to treat (and
diagnose) most of the remaining intractable disease classes (viral, genetic,
cancer). They are based on the central observation that objects of nanoscopic
size can (uniquely) gain access to, and operate in all parts of the body
(including the brain), and within cells. Nanosafety acknowledges that there
exists potential for new, serious and unpredictable diseases originating from
the interaction of such small-scale objects with living organisms. There have
been, as yet, limited numbers of clearly identified hazards from early phase
nanoparticles, but caution is being shown worldwide in developing strategies
to address the issues. It is also becoming increasingly clear that
Nanomedicine and Nanosafety will rely on the same fundamentally new scientific
enterprise, based on understanding (and in the medium term, predicting) the
interactions between nanoscale objects and living systems. Indeed, results
from experimental projects have produced extensive experimental information
that now needs to be integrated in early stage computation models. Early
experimental data now begins to clarify the basic scientific issues, and it is
clear that we are at the dawn of a new interdisciplinary science
(bionanointeractions). Besides crossing the traditional scientific domains
(chemistry, physics, molecular and cell biology, biomedicine, engineering, and
toxicology) this field will above all require a radical shift of scientific
paradigm such has rarely been seen in contiguous fields for a generation. The
implications of this are deep, and can hardly be overstated. All the evidence
we have suggests that we must return to fundamentals in this arena, and model
these new processes at multiple levels of description (nanoparticles surface,
cell, biological barriers) in order to develop a model that can usefully
integrate emerging biological in vitro and in vivo data. We show how multi-
scale simulations approaches are helpful to understand and control the basic
mechanisms, in the framework of our recent FP7 Collaborative Project
``Modelling the basis and kinetics of nanoparticle cellular interaction and
transport'' (NanoTransKinetics) of the ``Modelling toxicity behavior of
engineered nanoparticles'' call. We conclude that any attempt to press the
nano-organism interaction into such a macroscopic ADME (Adsorption, Digestion,
Metabolism, Excretion) framework that is not founded on the appropriate
microscopic principles will fail because the conceptual framework is the wrong
shape.