INNOVATION PROFILE/Science Foundation Ireland:REVOLUTIONARY MEDICINES that only go to where they are needed in the body and only act on the cells which require treatment are being made possible thanks to the work being done at the TCD School of Chemistry by Dr Silvia Giordani and her team.
The Science Foundation Ireland funded research is looking into the development of so-called “smart medicines” which have particular application in the fight against complex illnesses such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.
These illnesses require improved methods for their diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and control and these may be advanced by the use of nanotechnology.
Dr Giordani’s team is seeking to combine biological systems and new nanomaterials to develop new therapies which could ultimately lead to more efficient and affordable healthcare.
“If you think about traditional medicines, they go all over the place when they are introduced to the body,” Dr Giordani explains. “Smart medicines go where they are needed, the medicine has a brain of its own which can detect where it is to go and direct it there.”
These smart medicines start with a nanoparticle and the addition of other molecules to it to give it new properties.
“These are very, very tiny devices,” she points out. “One nanometre is one 80,000th the thickness of a human hair. These particles are so tiny they can go into the cells which we want to treat. As chemists we are adding functions to them. We can add a molecule to tell it where to go, for example. If a cancer cell has particular receptors on its surface we can make the device fit with it like a lock and key.”
And that’s not all the group can do. “We can add another molecule to it to make it fluoresce so that it the particles emit light and we can track them in the body,” she adds.
“Also, if the particles are targeted to go to cancer cells they will light up the area around a tumour assisting a surgeon to operate on it.”
The work thus far has been focused on carbon nanotubes which display unique structures and remarkable physical properties which make them promising candidates for the development of smart nanomaterials. These properties include their size and the fact that they can be modified through bonding with functional organic molecules.
This opens the way to the creation of entirely new medically important materials. Each nanoparticle can essentially be viewed as a targeted delivery system, with the ultimate aim of producing a system capable of direct “communication” between diagnostic, imaging and therapeutic functions located on a single biocompatible platform.
Giordani’s journey to Ireland and this ground breaking work began in her native Italy. “My undergraduate was in pharmaceutical chemistry and I went on to do a PhD in chemistry”, she says.
“My postdoctoral research involved carbon nanotubes. It was always in my head that this was the sort of area I wanted to be in but it wasn’t a linear thing. I had the chemistry and physics background as well as the pharmaceutical chemistry. It was really about putting the pieces together.”
She first came to Ireland in 2003 under the Marie Curie Fellowship programme and she returned in 2007 when she was awarded SFI’s “President of Ireland Young Researcher Award” (PIYRA) and joined the School of Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin as research lecturer.
“The PIYRA award allowed me to start my own research group and to work on the proof of concept that we could manipulate carbon nanotubes to functionalise them.”
She has now added to this award winning a prestigious 2012 L’Oréal-Unesco UK Ireland For Women in Science Fellowship (FWIS).
The fellowships promote the importance of ensuring greater participation of women in science by offering awards to outstanding female postdoctoral researchers. The awards are run in partnership with the UK National Commission for Unesco, the Irish National Commission for Unesco and the Royal Society.
“Our research has been funded by Science Foundation Ireland over the past five years and the L’Oreal fellowship will help us continue the work,” Giordani notes.
“We have developed the chemistry over the past five years and we are able to design and make in the lab the molecules which will functionalise a nanoparticle and make it go after something. But there are different elements to our work. We can add different functions such as a therapeutic function or a switch which will activate it only when a tumour or other cell type is reached.
“For example, you could have one type of molecule which when it enters a tumour cell could burst it from within or you could have a light producing molecule which would generate heat in a tumour cell destroying it that way.”
She is quick to point out that cancer is just one of many illnesses which the new medicines may be able to treat.
“In Ireland there is quite a high rate of cancer so there is naturally a focus on that area but in theory the technology can be used for anything. The beauty is that whatever you want to cure just means selecting a different target and then going after it with appropriate therapies. It is a question of designing a nano device with the right targeting system and the right cargo for the illness.”
These various applications see the group work with researchers across a wide range of areas.
“The work is inter-disciplinary,” she points out. “We have to talk to biologists, materials scientists, immunologists, physicists and so on. Collaboration is crucial to everything we do and this will enable us to make the technology suitable for any target.”
She is now moving on to the functionalisation of a different type of nano material – carbon nano-onions or concentric multilayer fullerenes to give them their scientific name. These can act as assembly-points for the different chemical functions that will, in turn, provide the means for applications in medical imaging and drug delivery in biological systems.
These carbon-based structures have tremendous potential in biomedical applications thanks to their unique spherical shape, their almost infinitely small size and their chemical homogeneity.
“They are like a soccer ball only with a series of other soccer balls inside it – a bit like a Russian doll,” she explains. “They have lots of good properties in terms of their size and they are easy to make and control. This makes them very good for functionalising.”
The next steps for her group will see them make an application for continued support from Science Foundation Ireland in order to bring the concept of smart medicines closer to reality. “We are preparing this application at the moment,” she says.
“I am very confident that within the next decade we will see smart medicines in use which are based on this technology.”
