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Project title: Development of new polymeric nanogels as drug delivery systems

Supervisor: Prof. Marina Resmini

Project description: Organic methacrylate nanogels are organic polymeric nanoparticles with size ranging from 10 to 100 nm; they can form stable colloidal solution and have a high surface/volume ratio, which make them excellent drug carriers. They also show opportunity to introduce functionalities by changing monomers and can be crosslinked (covalently/non covalently), adding co-monomers such as bisacrylamide. One of the synthetic opportunities to obtain these nanoparticles is High Dilution Radical Polymerisation which is the chosen technique in Resmini’s group, as it does not require surfactants and it is simple and up-scalable. Some of the nanogels we are currently investigating are the so-called “smart nanogels”, meaning that they react with conformational changes to a variation in external factors such as pH and temperature: this makes fine tuning of their properties even more interesting for drug delivery. Aim of my project is therefore to synthesise and characterise using cutting-edge techniques new acrylamide-based nanogels and tailor them to intranasal drug delivery, in cooperation with the rest of the Bio2Brain research team

Funding: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 956977

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