Speaker
Description
Bionano interactions sit at the heart of some of the most promising technologies of the
coming decade, including targeted drug delivery, mRNA vaccines, biosensors, theranostic
agents, and engineered interfaces for regenerative medicine. They are, at the same time,
the key to understanding the toxicity of nanomaterials. In both roles, what matters is not the
pristine nanomaterial but the dynamic corona of proteins and lipids that reshapes its surface
on contact with a biological fluid and ultimately determines the fate of the particle and its.
This corona governs how the particle is recognised by cell membranes and receptors,
directing uptake, intracellular trafficking, and downstream biological response.
In this presentation I will show how computational materials models and nanoinformatics
methods allow us to zoom into the bionano interface and identify the principal factors
controlling corona formation and the behaviour of nanomaterials in biological media. The
multiscale character of the problem demands a combination of physics-based simulation and
data-driven models built on machine learning. I will argue that soft matter physics provides
the mechanistic backbone that both next-generation nanotechnologies and regulatory
science increasingly need.