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Titolo: Self-assembling Nanotechnology for Cancer Personalized Medicine
Abstract: Theranostics is a new field of medicine, which combines specific targeted therapies and diagnostic tests. With a key focus on patient centered care, theranostics provides a transition from conventional medicine to a contemporary personalized and precision medicine approach. The theranostic paradigm in cancer involves nanoscience to unite diagnostic and therapeutic applications to form nanosized agents for diagnosis, drug/gene delivery and treatment response monitoring. These nanocarriers can indeed be engineered to precisely control drug/gene/sensor-release rate and/or target specific organs/tissues within the body with a specific amount of therapeutic/diagnostic agent. In order to fulfill these expectations, any nanovector system must be designed to transport the optimum amount of therapeutic/diagnostic cargo to the desired target site where the active principle is to be released at an optimal rate during a specific time window. Keeping the promises of theranostics is a current formidable challenge in (bio)nanotechnology, and major efforts are devoted to the design of integrated multifunctional and multivalent nanovectors able to provide selective recognition combined with sustained release and/or diagnostic reporting. In this contribution, the pathway leading to two types of nanosystems obtained by exploiting the quintessence of nanotechnology, i.e., the self-assembling process of small, amphiphilic molecules, is reported. Depending on the specific chemistry adopted, these nanomicelles are able to perform specific and effective gene silencing via targeted small interfering RNA (siRNA) delivery, and provide PET images with significantly superior imaging quality relating
to sensitivity, specificity and accuracy when compared to the clinical standard [18F]FDG.

Titolo: Dichloro-Phenyl-Benzotriazoles: A New Selective Class of Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus Entry Inhibitors
Abstract: Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is the primary cause of bronchopneumonia in infants and children worldwide. Clinical studies have shown that early treatments of RSV patients with ribavirin improve prognosis, even if the use of this drug is limited due to myelosuppression and toxicity effects. Furthermore, effective vaccines to prevent RSV infection are currently unavailable. Thus, the development of highly effective and specific antiviral drugs for pre-exposure prophylaxis and/or treatment of RSV infections is a compelling need.
In the quest of new RSV inhibitors, in this work we evaluated the antiviral activity of a series of variously substituted 5,6-dichloro-1-phenyl-1(2)H-benzo[d][1,2,3]triazole derivatives in cell-based assays. Several 1- and 2-phenyl-benzotriazoles resulted fairly potent (µM concentrations) inhibitors of RSV infection in plaque reduction assays, accompanied by low cytotoxicity in human highly dividing T lymphoid-derived cells and primary cell lines. Contextually, no inhibitory effects were observed against other RNA or DNA viruses assayed, suggesting specific activity against RSV. Further results revealed that the lead compound 10d was active during the early phase of the RSV infection cycle. To understand whether 10d interfered with virus attachment to target cells or virus-cell fusion events, inhibitory activity tests against the RSV mutant strain B1 cp-52 – expressing only the F envelope glycoprotein – and a plasmid-based reporter assay that quantifies the bioactivity of viral entry were also performed. The overall biological results, in conjunction with in silico modeling studies, supported the conclusion that the RSV fusion process could be the target of this new series of compounds.

Titolo: Integrating multiscale simulations for composite materials with industrial business decision: The EU H2020 COMPOSELECTOR project experience
Abstract: The integration of modelling and simulation techniques to support material selection processes (MSPs) is one of the most compelling needs in advancing material industry and manufactory, due to the necessity of effective/efficient design and production of sophisticated materials, components and systems with advanced/extreme performance on a competitive time scale. In this arena, and specifically for complex structural materials such as polymer-based nanocomposites (PNCs) there is a strong industrial demand for chemistry/physics-based models and modelling workflows able to predict relevant materials properties (aka Key Performance Indicators or KPIs) in an accurate and reliable way and prior to any experimental set-up. With the aim of filling the gap between business processes and materials science/engineering workflows, this work reports the application – within the framework of the EU H2020 project COMPOSELECTOR – of a multidisciplinary, multi-model approach for the accurate, reliable, efficient and cost-effective industry-driven KPIs determination for PNC materials. Specifically, three examples of questions and answers pertaining to aerospace and automotive applications are presented and discussed.

October 22 2019: And the winner is Domenico Marson, posing as best young investigator award recipient at ICSEC2019 in Qatar with our Nature paper on dna!!!!

October 18, 2019: 1^st CA17140 Conference in Riga with nearly 100 oral and poster communications, our 1st CA17140 Conference in Riga was a success!

3.  May 2019: MolBNL shows recent results in material and life sciences at the University of Tarnow (Molecular desing in Bionìmedial applications)..