Human immune profiling of graphene nanoribbons
To promote the Safe and Healthy use of ‘Future and Emerging Technologies’ such as innovative carbon-based nanomaterials, the study of their interactions with blood immune cells is of fundamental importance for any translational medicine application, in particular, those requiring intravenous injection.

Taking Graphene Nanoribbons (GNRs) as model, IMM-GNRs will overcome the limits of conventional nano-immunotoxicology to achieve a comprehensive picture of their immune activity in relation to their structural properties (shape, edge structures, width, size…), enhancing the EU excellence in 2D materials research.

IMM-GNRs Specific Objectives are:

1° To design and synthetize a wide variety of highly stable and water-soluble GNRs
2° To perform quantitative GNRs deep immune phenotyping on 17 diverse immune subpopulations, demonstrating the potential of a forefront approach coupling an array of high-throughput technologies
3° To correlate immune phenotype and physicochemical properties, investigating the potential molecular mechanisms underlying the observed immune-functions, in order to provide an outstanding paradigm shift in the nanomaterials engineering and classification proposing the novel “immunity-by-design” concept.

IMM-GNRs multidisciplinary action will provide the fellow with new career perspectives and contribute to European excellence and competitiveness by:

I. Developing expertise in cutting-edge technologies whose diffusion is still limited in Europe; the lack of EU experts make the Fellow’s experience (she will be the first worldwide to apply CyTOF technology to the nanoworld) an high added value to European Academia and Industrial sector;
II. Setting long-term collaborations among leading groups of nanotechnology and cell biology;
III. Gaining exposure to the industrial sector: GNRs as immunomodulators can give rich possibilities for new therapeutic approaches in particular in the field of immunotherapy.