Cancer incidence and mortality are growing worldwide at an alarming pace, emphasizing the urgent need for new strategies to combat this disease.
One of the frontiers of cancer research is currently focused on the design of multifunctional magnetic nanoparticles capable to achieve the synergistic cancer theranostics (both diagnosis and therapy). Although the potentiality that these multifunctional nanosystems represents to nanomedicine, cancer treatment and
diagnostic, there are still many challenges that must be addressed in a near future before this approach became a reality. The development of efficient multifunctional magnetic nanosystems able to selectively destroy cancer cells in detriment of healthy ones, is one of the main challenges that have damped the spread of this technology into clinical applications. The limited biological and biophysical studies between the biomedical nanosystems and cells/tissues/organs is another challenge that has to be addressed. With these two main challenges in mind, the present Ph.D. work was focused in the development of: (1) Multifunctional
magnetic carbon nanostructures as multifunctional nanosystems for the treatment of cancer, and (2) New advanced microfluidic devices capable to give new insights over the developed nanosystems and human cells.
The successful accomplishment of the multidisciplinary tasks considered in
this Ph.D. work, was supported by important collaborations that were strengthened at different
stages in the frame of this Ph.D. project, namely INL - International Iberian Nanotechnology
Laboratory (Braga, Portugal); CeRiCol - Centro Ricerche Colorobbia Consulting (Vinci, Italy);
CIMO – Centro de Investigação da Montanha (Bragança, Portugal) and Harvard-MIT Division of
Health Sciences and Technology (Cambridge, USA).
R.O. Rodrigues acknowledge the Ph.D. scholarship SFRH/BD/97658/2013 granted by Fundação
para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), as well as a Fulbright Research Grant 2017, granted
by Fulbright Portugal.
