Quantifying the immune response to biomaterials at the cellular level, while reducing the number of animals used in experiments and the cost of biomaterial discovery, will be possible thanks to an innovative microchip developed as part of the In2Sight project coordinated by Milano-Bicocca.
The project was launched in March 2021 by an international consortium of academic, research and industrial partners with different and complementary skills. In particular, the Italian research is a synergy between three Milanese universities: Milano-Bicocca (lead partner), Politecnico and Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele.
The project, led by Giuseppe Chirico (Full Professor of Physics at Milano-Bicocca) and coordinated by the Biophotonics Group of the Department of Physics, aims to advance biomaterials research by making it economically and ethically viable, relying on a revolutionary in vivo optical imaging device combined with AI methods.
During its first 30 months of research and development, the In2Sight project has demonstrated its great potential for long-term quantitative analysis of the inflammatory response to biomaterial implantation.
The consortium continuously maintains a dataset, including validation tests and usage protocols, deposited on the open access data platform Bicocca Open Archive Research Data (BOARD), and a European patent has been filed and is in the validation phase.
In2Sight is a project at the forefront of biomedical research and is an integral part of Cost Action Improve, a pan-European infrastructure dedicated to accelerating the translation of new technologies into clinical and pre-clinical practice.
"This project," stresses Giuseppe Chirico, "was born with a clear ethical intention in biomedical research and opens up new perspectives in the application of nanotechnology to personalised medicine, which have not been explored until now".