Our new EU FP7 funded project GUIDEnano has just started. Under the lead of Prof. Víctor Puntes, our group is participating of the GUIDEnano consortium along with 26 partners, coordinated by LEITAT Technological Center. The project officially started on November 1st, 2013, and the kick-off meeting recently took place in Barcelona, Spain, on December 9-11, 2013.

The main objective of GUIDEnano is to develop innovative methodologies to evaluate and manage human and environmental health risks of nano-enabled products, considering the whole product life cycle. Our group participates of Work Packages 2, 3, 8, 9 and 11, but we will particularly devoted to WP7, of which we are WP leader. In this WP we will develop new technologies for risk reduction and risk management of nanomaterials, in which we mainly aim to generate nanosafety-by-design strategies for nanomaterials production.

Project website: http://www.guidenano.eu/

http://www.qualitynano.eu/access.html

The deadline for this fifth call is November 22, 2013. The deadline has been EXTENDED TILL JANUARY 21.

The Transnational Access component of the EU-FP7 project QualityNano is dedicated to providing the European nanosafety community with access to services and equipment for nanomaterials synthesis, processing, characterisation and exposure assessment located at major European research centres, known as Transnational Access Facilities (TAFs). A broad array of analytical services will be available, including various techniques in microscopy (TEM, SEM, confocal, etc.) and spectroscopy (XRD, and Z-potential, UV-Vis), as well as centrifugation and purification. The ICN-ICN2 is among the 15 TAFs participating in QualityNano through the Inorganic Nanoparticles Group, which offers technical support in the synthesis and characterisation of diverse types of inorganic nanoparticles.

We encourage you to apply! Do contact our group if we can assist you in any way.

This workshop is meant to disseminate the scientific results achieved within the last 42 months by the EU-FP7 project MAGNIFYCO, on the topic: Magnetic nano-containers for combined hyperthermia and controlled drug release. Additionally, it includes the presence of external high level keynote and invited speakers working in closely related topics, such as Nanomaterials, Physical & Chemical Characterization, Functionalization, Diagnosis, Targeting and Hyperthermia.

The workshop will take place February 20-22 in Barcelona, in the Aula Magna “Enric Casassas” of the School of Chemistry and Physics, Universitat de Barcelona (Avinguda Diagonal 645, 08028 Barcelona). More information can be found at: http://www.magnifyco.eu/magnifyco-2013-workshop.

You are all invited to attend! (registration is free, till February 5, 2013).

Below follows the abstract of Víctor’s talk.

Inserting inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) into biological media is quite challenging. Specially if those NPs are supposed to perform a certain task in a certain moment. First of all there are aspects of simple aggregation, determined by density, size, concentration, media and surface state. Inorganic NPs are happy at low concentrations in low electrolyte concentration to have use of their high surface charge to overcome the handicaps of their high density and compactness. Besides, their biological counterparts are happy at high concentration in high saline media. This is regarding its colloidal stability, but NPs also suffer chemical and biological transformations as those of dissolution, corrosion, oxidation, or those corresponding with interactions with the immune system and phagocytosis. This is because inorganic NPs are normally unstable, that is why they are so active and interesting… such a high electronic density in the size of a protein! To illustrate that, look at a simple consequence of size: nanocarriers can strongly contribute to modifications in pharmacokinetics and biodistribution of the carrier drugs, by leading them through different pathways depending on the morphological, physical and chemical properties of the nanocarrier, which is especially appealing in the case of very toxic drugs. Inside the body, pores smaller than 1 nm have been only reported in the tight junctions on certain continuous capillaries (including the central nervous system, i.e., blood-brain barrier, placenta and testis barrier) while continuous capillaries (muscle, lung, skin) have pores of 6 nm. Fenestrated capillaries (kidney, intestine, some endocrine and exocrine glands) have pores up to 50–60 nm, usually closed by a diaphragm. Finally, discontinuous capillaries (liver, spleen, bone marrow) have pores between 100–1000 nm, which allow the passage of macromolecules between plasma and interstitium. Thus, small molecules (below 6 nm, the majority of drugs) leak in and out from the blood vessels and are rapidly (in minutes) cleared from blood via the kidneys while the passive transport of macromolecules through these porous is negligible. Thus a NP sized between 6–40 nm may follow protein paths to finally accumulate in organs of the mononuclear phagocyte system, especially the liver and spleen, as do proteins and protein aggregates, while larger sizes of NP are easily recognized by the immune system and also end up in liver and spleen but within a shorter time, all in all offering different paths to nanoparticles to tour. It is worth noting here that blood vessel permeability changes in diseases such as inflammation and cancer. All this aspects refer to morphological and intrinsic properties designed at the synthesis time to carefully choose composition, shape and size.