An ever-increasing number of medical applications are adopting nanotechnology to a variable extent in order to go beyond the current state-of-the-art. Targeted drug delivery, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, or biosensing already benefit from using nanomaterials to improve the current healthcare systems of our society. BioMag aims to provide a quick, sensitive, precise, reliable and low-cost in vitro diagnostics methodology for detection of biomarkers taking advantage of the current progress on the synthesis and characterisation of magnetic nanoparticles for developing and validating a novel magnetic detection of biomarkers present in human blood plasma. The BioMag detection methodology is grounded on: i) the design of magnetic nanoparticles functionalised with recognition ligands (F-MNPs) that specifically interact with cardiac biomarkers (I and T troponins) related to myocardial infarction, ii) the change of magnetic properties of F-MNPs upon interaction with biomarkers (i.e. analyte), iii) the use of such variation of the magnetic properties of F-MNPs reflected on the hysteresis loops to quantify the target biomarkers. BioMag aims to bring the proposed technology from its initial Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 2 to 5. Indeed, recent results from IMDEA team showed the proof of concept of this novel and original methodology, which enables a significant modulation of the detection sensitivity by distinct means (i.e. MNP chemical composition and size, field conditions, multivalency of analyte, number of ligands per MNP). The advantage of the BioMag method with respect to other magnetic-ones is the quasi-instant measurement time (a few seconds), the non-required sample preparation prior the dispersion of F-MNPs in the sample, and the low cost of the required instrumentation (i.e. AC magnetometer).

Prof. Francisco J. Teran coordinates the BIOMAG project in collaboration with other team leaders:

Prof. Matej Praprotnik (NIC), Prof. Rafael Gomez (UAH), and Dr. Takashi Yoshida (KUN).

The four BIOMAG ‘s goals are :
1) the production of F-MNPs for specific interaction with biomarkers related to myocardial infarction (troponins I and T) present in human blood plasma while minimising their unspecific interaction with other off-target biomolecules.

2) setting the suitable conditions to magnetically detect biomarkers.

3) the development of numerical simulations in order to model the variation of the AC hysteresis loops for quantifying the analyte amount detected in the studied sample.

4) the validation of biomarker quantification by comparing BioMag results with clinical detection technologies. BioMag consortium gathers excellent and multidisciplinary research teams that complement each other for achieving the proposed objectives while approaching fundamental material science towards market applications.