therapies – Politecnico di Milano

ACTIVE: the digital app for personalised coaching

Posted on 08/02/202409/02/2024 by admin

Yesterday in the morning, at the Lecco Campus, the ACTIVE App was presented. It is a personalised coaching application created as part of ActivE³ – Everyone, Everywhere, Everyday, a Major Emblematic Project funded by Fondazione Cariplo and Regione Lombardia that aims at promoting an active lifestyle through the use of technology. The app is the result of the work of the researchers of Sensibilab – Laboratory for Sensors and Biomedical Systems at the Lecco Campus, ASST Lecco, ATS Brianza and Villa Beretta – Presidio di Riabilitazione dell’Ospedale Valduce.

The app has a dual function: for the user, it is a digital personalised training guide that includes health tips; for researchers and health professionals, it is a useful data platform to check the effectiveness of this tool in improving/maintaining well-being and for designing new prevention initiatives aimed at the community.

We are approaching the new era of digital therapies. Today, as part of the Active3 project, we start experimenting a prevention service based on an App aimed to promote and monitor active and nutritionally balanced lifestyles for the over-60 population.

A clinical trial phase will now start, involving 200 healthy individuals in the 60-80 age group for the next 18 months. The trial will be validated by a screening of the participants’ health status and will include cognitive questionnaires on health status and nutrition and motor, psychometric and neuro-psychological tests as well as blood samples, which will be used to assess the effects of using the app on the participants’ overall health. The ACTIVE app will act as a motivational tool to encourage more static participants to get active and to stimulate those already active to maintain a healthy lifestyle by providing feedback on their activity and personalised hints.

Thanks to Fondazione Cariplo, Regione Lombardia and the network of technological and clinical partners, we are developing an integrated system in the local area that we hope will be used and disseminated after the end of the project in favour of a real 5P medicine (Preventive, Predictive, Participative, Personalised and Psychosocial) of the future.
Prof. Giuseppe Andreoni, scientific coordinator of the Sensibilab laboratory,

ReBone: designing customised bone replacement implants

Posted on 03/02/202409/02/2024 by admin

ReBone, a Doctoral Network coordinated by Politecnico di Milano and funded by the European Union within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) has kicked off. Young researchers involved will develop innovative technologies for creating customised 3D-printed bone replacement implants based on bioactive ceramics.

The ultimate goal is to provide clinical experts with the tools to produce customised bone graft substitutes, allowing for individualised therapeutic solutions for each patient in terms of mechanical and mechanical-biological performance, surgical implantability and reliability of the manufacturing process.

In addition, ReBone will develop state-of-the-art in silico models, based on advanced computational methods and characterisation and validation techniques, for customised implants with a visualisation system for mixed-reality surgical planning.

ReBone is a European project funded under the Horizon Europe programme that will enrol 10 young researchers in as many European PhD schools. The project intersects many disciplines including materials engineering, 3D printing technology of ceramic material devices, biomechanics, biology and augmented reality,
Pasquale Vena, professor of Industrial Bioengineering at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering ‘Giulio Natta’ and coordinator of the project

In addition to Politecnico di Milano, ReBone involves partners from eight European countries: Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Università del Piemonte Orientale (Italy), University of Liège (Belgium), Lithoz (Austria), Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Osteology (Austria), University of Salzburg (Austria), Department of Technology and Metallurgy, University of Belgrade (Serbia) MedApp (Poland), EU CORE Consulting (Italy), Cerhum (Belgium), Science on the Street (Slovenia), University of Tampere (Finland), Université Paris-Est Créteil (France), AUVA Trauma Centre Meidling (Austria).

For further information and to participate in the PhD programme, please visit the ReBone website or contact Pasquale Vena, project coordinator (pasquale.vena@polimi.it).

3D personalized model of biliary tract cancer

Posted on 24/01/202408/02/2024 by admin

It is only a few centimeters in size and can be held between two fingers, but in the micro-channels carved inside it, it’s hidden a three-dimensional and highly faithful model of a biliary tract cancer called cholangiocarcinoma, complete with its tumor microenvironment.

This 3D model is built starting from a sample of patient’s cancer cells and thus it represents a patient-specific “organ-on-chip”: a technology made possible only through a multidisciplinary approach that merges biomedicine, physics and engineering.

The innovative prototype is the result of the collaboration between Ana Lleo De Nalda, Full Professor at Humanitas University and head of the Hepatobiliary Immunopathology Laboratory at Humanitas Research Hospital, and Marco Rasponi, Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano and head of the Laboratory of Microfluidics and Biomimetic Microsystems.

The study was made possible thanks to the collaboration with the group of Prof. Guido Torzilli, Director of the Department of General Surgery and head of the Hepatobiliary Surgery Unit of the IRCCS Istituto Clinico Humanitas.

The ultimate goal of the device is to accelerate research on cholangiocarcinoma by providing a new laboratory model that better mimics what we observe in patients. At the same time, it will help advancing precision medicine, since it could be potentially used as a personalized drug-testing platform, helping predict patients’ response to therapies.
Ana Lleo and Marco Rasponi

The study was funded by AIRC – the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research, and was published in the Journal of Hepatology Reports.

What is cholangiocarcinoma

Cholangiocarcinoma is a rare cancer of the liver (it affects about 5,500 people in Italy alone, each year) and it derives from a malignant transformation of cholangiocytes, the cells lining the biliary tract.

Unfortunately, the disease is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, because patients show very few symptoms. This is also why treatments are often ineffective: at the time of diagnosis, only 10-30% of patients are eligible to undergo surgical removal of the tumor.

Precisely because of the reduced therapeutic options and high mortality of cholangiocarcinoma, we need new in vitro models that can recapitulate the characteristics of the disease and in particular the interaction between tumor cells and cells of the immune system, which play a key role in its progression and response to drugs.
Ana Lleo

A 3D platform for advancing research and personalized medicine

Now, for the first time, researchers from Humanitas and Politecnico di Milano developed a personalized 3D model of the disease.

It is a microfluidic chip a few centimeters in size. Inside the device, in the micrometer channels realized using advanced photolithographic techniques, we seeded cancer cells sampled from patients affected by cholangiocarcinoma. The cells successfully reproduced the tumor architecture in vitro.
Marco Rasponi

In a series of experiments, the team of researchers demonstrated that the device faithfully recapitulates what we observe in individual patients, both in terms of T-cell activation, that correlates with tumor infiltration, and in terms of therapeutic response to different drugs, based on the characteristics of cancer recurrence.

We are very happy with the result obtained, which was only possible thanks to the combination of different expertise and knowledge.

The next steps will be to further optimize and improve the device, both as a research model and as a personalized drug-testing platform.
Ana Lleo and Marco Rasponi

We want to add cells of innate immune system, such as macrophages, which play an important role in tumor progression, and introduce micro-pumps that can mimic blood flow and vascularization. We also need to test it on larger groups of patients, to confirm its ability to recapitulate the phenomena we observe in the clinical setting.

Results on the Journal of Hepatology Reports