Nano³ Health

To implement this research operation, focused on health issues, the team has undertaken an intensive collaborative approach with several external partners, both academic and industrial, allowing to combine the expertise in physics present in the laboratory with those in biology and chemistry present in specialized laboratories. The objective of these multidisciplinary collaborations is to study the interaction between a biological subject (bacteria, virus, cell, …) and physical objects (ions, nanoparticles, nanostructures, …). Our contribution focuses on the analysis of cytotoxicity, bacterial and viral adhesion properties, diffusion, nucleation and growth, induced also by cellular defense mechanisms. We also deal with the characterization of the interaction by electron and near-field microscopies and by spectroscopy. We study thus, the bactericidal properties of silver on model bacteria (with I2BC), the production of anti-bacterial and viral proliferation nanostructured films (with LifeSearch), the trapping of virions to reduce the viral load (with Inserm) and the synthesis of a new family of Ag@Si-NCs nano-carriers, allowing to transport to the bacterial target classical antibiotics (with Lisbon and Vigo, FCT project).