In the last decade, nanotechnologies and biomedicine have reached remarkable levels of integration and cross-fertilization aiming to address unmet clinical needs by designing functional materials and transformative technologies for precision medicine. This seminar will review how we harness light-matter interaction at the nanoscale to design artificial materials with fascinating properties mainly originating by form-function relationships.
Among several others, hybrid nano-carriers, viral cargos, plasmonic metamaterials represent only a small fraction of a large variety of systems proposed to achieve local drug-delivery, photo-thermal and photodynamic therapies, high resolution imaging and sensing, stimulated specific immune response to treat and monitor neurodegenerative diseases and cancers. In this context, we have developed miniaturized plasmonic biosensor platforms that outperform current sensing technologies and are based on hyperbolic metamaterials which support highly confined bulk plasmon modes. Recent opto-genetic research activities based on neurophotonics approaches will be discussed. This research is a major scientific and technological challenge that will revolutionize our capability of managing and exploiting neuronal circuits.
|