New projects & Milestones
The Inorganic Nanoparticles team focuses on the production and application of advanced inorganic nanoparticles, with a strong emphasis on multi-component and hollow systems comprising different families of metals, metal oxides, semiconductor oxides and semiconductors. Nanoparticles are engineered and designed following Responsible Research & Innovation (RRI) principles given their applicability in catalysis, energy harvesting, environmental remediation and nanobiomedicine, among others. This is achieved by controlling the size, shape and structure of their inorganic core, and selectively linking active molecules to the nanoparticles’ surface, thereby allowing them to interact only with specific targets. We also focus on the precise characterisation of the obtained nanoparticles in terms of their reactivity (aggregation, corrosion and dissolution) and physicochemical properties as prepared, during and after use.
In 2020 the Inorganic Nanoparticles Group continued working on its several ongoing projects devoted to the design and synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles for interaction with biological systems and for energy harvesting.
The CONCORD project, funded by the European Commission through the EuroNanoMed programme, aims at developing a new type of transfection nanovectors to improve current CAR-T cell therapy technology by the use of gold nanoparticles. The project is coordinated by our team and can count on the expertise of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche “Mario Negri” in Milan (Italy) and the Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv (Israel).
The ECLIPSE project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, focuses on developing novel functional nanoparticles for use in diverse energy applications. The objective of this project is to develop bottom-up colloidal strategies to produce tailor-making novel catalytic materials based on atomically-defined colloidal NCs, for their use in the efficient transformation of solar energy to solar fuels and the low-cost transformation of solar fuels to electrical energy.
ENDONANO, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) project funded by the European Commission, is devoted to the quantitative detection of bacterial endotoxins using novel nanotechnological approaches.
The Meta2nol project (under the Ramon Areces programme), led by Prof. Antoni Sanchez of the UAB, focuses on the development of MOF-NPs advanced systems for methanol conversion.
The AGAUR, Indústria del Coneixement, PRODUCTE Project, aims at developing the applicability of CeO2 NPs as therapeutic agents for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma.