RESEARCH TEAM
Principal investigators: Luis Manuel Liz Marzán (CIC biomaGUNE) and Maurizio Prato (CIC biomaGUNE).
Team members: Lucía Borrallo López (CIC biomaGUNE); Lucia Cardo (CIC biomaGUNE); Jinyi Dong (CIC biomaGUNE); Isabel García Martín (CIC biomaGUNE); Elisa Sturabotti (CIC biomaGUNE); and Gail Vinnacombe-Willson (CIC biomaGUNE).
DESCRIPTION
Many pharmaceutical drugs are composed of organic molecules with a property called chirality, which can be beneficial or harmful depending on a small difference in structure (whether they turn right or left). It was precisely ignorance of this difference that led to the thalidomide crisis of the 1950s and 1960s, when a drug designed for the treatment of nausea in pregnant women caused severe birth defects like malformed or missing limbs in thousands of children whose mothers had been prescribed it. This is why it is so vital to ensure that drugs developed from these molecules are pure in composition, which calls, in turn, for extremely precise catalysts. The aim of the CHIMERA project is to develop nanoparticles that can be of great utility in this fundamental area of biomedicine.
“Because these molecules interact with proteins and other bodily components, their effect can range from being curative to dangerously poisonous,” explains Luis Manuel Liz Marzán, a Research Professor at CIC biomaGUNE and a PI on the project together with his colleague from the same center, Maurizio Prato. “Our proposal draws on experiments run in our lab for the fabrication of particles at an atomic or just above atomic scale, so they maintain selectivity between right or left-handed versions.”
Using metals like gold, palladium and platinum, the team will work on developing this new nanotechnology, so that “chiral organic molecules, especially those of pharmaceutical interest, can be synthesized with a high degree of purity.” This is a cutting-edge, exploratory project, since “we still know next to nothing about the complementarity at these scales between the spin of a particle and the spin of the molecule to be synthesized.”
Over the three-year life of the project, tests will be run with diverse types of catalytic reactions, seeking to perfect a technique that in future – says Liz Marzán – can be applied in the production of “molecules of pharmaceutical interest.”