Title: Multifunctional amino acid-based soft materials for cancer therapy
Time: July 12th 10:00 am
Inviter: Prof. Renjun Pei
Location: Conference Room A718
Biography: Dr. Alberto Bianco received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Padova (Italy). As a visiting scientist, he worked at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), the University of Tübingen (Germany) (as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow), the University of Padova and Kyoto University (Japan). He is currently Distinguished Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Strasbourg. His research interests focus on the design of multifunctional carbon and 2D nanomaterials for therapy, diagnostics and imaging. He is also interested on their health impact, particularly on the immune system. He has published more than 350 articles (h-index: 95, > 52500 citations). In 2017 he has been elected Fellow of the European Academy of Science and in 2020 of the Academia Europaea, and in 2019 he has obtained the CNRS Silver Medal. Since 2011 he is Editor of the journal CARBON.
Abstract: The self-assembly of amino acids derivatives and their applications in the biomedical field have drawn much attention in the past years. In this seminar, the binary nanoparticles made of co-assembled Fmoc-protected aromatic amino acids are presented for drug delivery and combined cancer therapy. Fmoc-Tyr-OH and Fmoc-Phe-OH self-assemble into nanofibers, while the structure is transformed into nanoparticles when it is co-assembled using Fmoc-Trp-OH. The self-assembly is driven by non-covalent interactions, making the formed nanomaterials unstable and limiting their further development. For this reason, we introduced the covalent dityrosine bonds by crosslinking the side chains irradiating at 254 nm or at 365 nm in the presence of riboflavin as photo-initiator. When compared with the non-crosslinked nanoparticles, both mechanical strength and chemical stability of these nanoparticles were remarkably enhanced. These nanoparticles were then used for drug delivery, adsorbing the anticancer drug doxorubicin (Dox), and subsequently coating them by a tannic acid-iron complex, which endow them with glutathione-responsiveness and photothermal properties, for a controlled release of Dox. A remarkable anticancer efficiency was obtained in vitro and in vivo in tumour-bearing mice, thanks to the combined chemo- and photothermal treatment.
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