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Author
Salvador Devert, Pol
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Abstract
Although nanomedicine is clinically accepted and there are many studies on its usefulness, there are often no comprehensive studies based on the interaction of nanoparticles with biological components such as cells or macromolecules. However, it has been proved that these interactions may contribute to the modulation of intracellular metabolic mechanisms that are involved in the development of diseases such as cancer. Hence, the aim of this work is to study how polymeric nanoparticles can modulate cellular metabolic pathways, such as endocytosis or autophagy, using advanced spectroscopic and microscopy techniques.
The research group has over time discovered the capabilities and benefits of using OMpBAEs for the formulation of nanoparticles as gene delivery systems. Thus, by transfecting these into tumor cell lines, will allow the characterization of the different intracellular processes in which they are subjected.
With this being said, the study of this TFG is focus on characterizing the behavior of polymeric nanosystems internalized in modified tumoral cell lines. The down-regulation of essential genes for the proper functioning of intracellular mechanisms such as autophagy and ferri-tinophagy, will allow us to understand their importance and to compare the variations of the mechanisms in regard with nanoparticle transfection.
Specifically, this project has characterized tumoral cell lines in the absence of ATG5 and NCOA4 protein-coding genes, key players in autophagy and ferritinophagy respectively, which have subsequently been used for the transfection of combinations of OM-pBAE nano-particles encapsulating plasmid DNA, with the aim of describing and comparing the modulation of these intracellular mechanisms to which our systems are subjected. These results will pave the way for the rational design of polymeric nanoparticles knowing how they will influence cell metabolism.
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