Nanomedicine applications mediated by electromagnetic fields

Recently, the introduction of nanotechnologies into medical applications has become more frequent due to the growing of several diseases originating from alteration of biological processes at molecular and nanoscale level (e.g. mutated genes, cell malfunction due to viruses or bacteria). The nanomedicine combines the innovation of the nanotechnology materials (shape and size of nm scale) to health care, providing new promising techniques for the diagnosis, the prevention, the tissue regeneration and therapeutic fields. Disorders like cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular problems or inflammatory diseases are serious challenges to be dealt with. For this reason researches are focusing their attention to the nanomaterials unique properties [Murty et al., 2013, Xia et al., 2009]. The progress in nanomedicine ranges from nanoparticles for molecular diagnostics, imaging and therapy to integrated medical nanosystems [Nune et al., 2009, Shi, 2009] to act at the cellular level inside the body. For a recent review on challenges, opportunities, and clinical applications in nanomedicine an interesting review is the one of Wicki et al. [Wicki et al., 2015]. Despite the concerns raised by the authors in their review, the expert opinion on clinical opportunities finds a generalized consensus on stimuli-responsive systems for targeting the compound (drug, gene, biomolecule) at the site of interest and on the use of lipid based nanosystems for the biocompatible platform to be used in clinical trials. In this scenario is placed the main activity of this Ph.D. thesis whose aim is to provide a multiscale and multidisciplinary approach to demonstrate the capability to activate lipid-based nanosystems by means of electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Specifically, the attention will be focused, on a first part, on the liposome-based systems mediated by EMF to provide a proof-of-concept of EMF stimuli-response systems for applications of drug delivery. This aspect will be approached both form a theoretic, technological and experimental point of view. Moreover, because proteins are considered a fundamental pattern as bio-sensors for signaling cell processes, a molecular dynamics simulation approach will be provided to study the interaction mechanisms between EMFs and proteins structures for potential protein activation.