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.
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).
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.
NN group members Amanda Muñoz and Anna Laromaine have published this paper in collaboration with other researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG) and UAB university in Barcelona.
NN group member Nanthilde Malandain collaborated in this interesting paper about the synthesis and characterization of nanostructured scaffolds based on bacterial nanocellulose for bone tissue engineering under the supervision of Anna Laromaine, Anna Roig and Carlos A. García-González.