Soft Matter
We study complex molecular systems on the nanoscale. Our research is both fundamental and oriented towards technological applications, including instrumentation development. We prepare complex molecular architectures, and we characterize them by several structural and dynamical experimental methods. The applications are focussed on: food science, biotechnological and biomedical applications.
Many complex fluids (mayonnaise, yoghurt, foams, paints, creams, pastes, etc.) are made up of multi-phase systems, characterized by a very high ratio between the interface area and the volume. Their stability is determined by processes such as aggregation and coalescence of individual bubbles or drops. In these, mechanical properties of the single interface play a fundamental role, in particular the dynamic response of these interfaces to the perturbation of their surface area.
A major limit of current therapies is the lack of a precise localization. Drugs circulate in the whole body, interacting also with healthy tissues, where they could cause collateral effects. This is true in particular for cancer therapy, where radiotherapy and chemotherapic drugs. Nanostructures have been proposed as a solution to this problem; they can be developed to target the ill tissue or tumoral mass, providing a localized therapy which could also provide an answer to the problem of drug resistance.
