Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kanlaya Katewongsa visited the Nanoparticles and Nanocomposites Group from June 12 – 14. Katewongsa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Mahidol University (Thailand) and holds an adjunct role at the School of Materials Science and Innovation. She delivered a seminar on June 12 called In vitro Studies of Riboflavin Functionalized Magnetic Nanoparticles for Breast Cancer Delivery.

During this last week, Amanda Muñoz-Juan and Asier Rodríguez Muguruza have participated in outreach activities in Barcelona. The N&N post-doctoral researchers brought the group’s science outside the lab thanks to the events BAR meetings and Pint of Science.

The article “Unlocking the Potential of Wood Residues for Producing Screen-Printed Electrochemical Sensors” has been published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering!

Former NN group member Wenchao Duan and his supervisor Martí Gich have published this interesting paper demostrating that wood waste can be used as feedstock for producing electrochemical sensors for water pollutant analysis. The use of biopolymers to produce carbon-based inks is currently being investigated in our group with the project Upcycling Organic Waste into Carbon-based Functional Inks for Environmental Sensing and Smart Textiles (UPCYCLING-NOW).

The article “Biosafety evaluation of etoposide lipid nanomedicines in C. elegans” has been published in Drug Delivery and Translational Research journal.

In this project, NN group members Amanda Muñoz and Anna Laromaine have collaborated with the group of María J. Blanco-Prieto (Universidad de Navarra and IdiSNA) for the evaluation of lipid nanoparticles with encapsulated Etoposide. They first evaluated the toxicity of empty and loaded nanoparticles in cancerous and healthy cell lines in vitro. The results demonstrated that etoposide nanomedicines exhibited high toxicity and selectively induced apoptosis only in cancerous cells. Next, the biosafety of these nanomedicines  was evaluated in C. elegans by measuring survival, body size, and the effect on dividing cells. The findings showed that the nanomedicines had a safer profile than the free etoposide in this model. Notably, nanomedicines exerted etoposide’s antiproliferative effect only in highly proliferative germline cells. Therefore, the developed nanomedicines hold promise as safe drug delivery systems for etoposide, potentially leading to an improved therapeutic index for neuroblastoma treatment.