UniSR in the In2Sight project for more sustainable in vivo experimentation

Enabling the quantification of the immune reaction to biomaterials at the cellular level and at the same time reducing both the number of animals involved in experiments and the costs of biomaterial: it will be possible thanks to an innovative microchip developed by 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 diverse and complementary expertise. Specifically, the Italian research is a synergy between three Milanese universities - Milano-Bicocca (lead), Politecnico and Vita-Salute San Raffaele University.

The project, led by Giuseppe Chirico (full professor of Physics at Milano-Bicocca) and coordinated by the Biophotonics group of the Physics department, aims at advancing research on biomaterials by making it economically and ethically sustainable, by 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 shown its great potential for sustained quantitative analysis of the inflammatory response to biomaterial implantation.

The consortium constantly updates a data set including validation tests and usage protocols, deposited on the open access data platform Bicocca Open Archive Research Data (BOARD), and a European patent has already been submitted and is in the validation phase.

In2Sight is a cutting-edge project in biomedical research and it is an integral part of Cost Action Improve, a pan-European infrastructure dedicated to accelerating the translation of new technologies for clinical and preclinical practice.

"This project," emphasizes Giuseppe Chirico, "was born with a clear ethical intent in biomedical research and opens up new perspectives in the application of nanotechnology to personalized medicine, hitherto unexplored."

Coordinator of the project for UniSR is Dr. Donato Inverso, a researcher in General Pathology at UniSR and Group Leader of the Vascular Pathobiology Unit at IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele, who initiated the project at The German Center for Cancer Research (DKFZ. Heidelberg, Germany) and then moved to UniSR in 2022.

States Dr. Inverso:

We studied the reaction of the vascular system and inflammatory response to microchips with different geometry and made of different biomaterials. Our experimentation has allowed us to generate the information needed to define structures that are increasingly biocompatible and usable to study complex biological phenomena such as vessel growth and immune system cell migration. This activity gives us the unique opportunity to be able to participate in the very early stages of the development of new bio-medical technologies even before they become available for clinical or preclinical testing, generating a significant technological advantage for our unit.