University of Nova Goriza (PP1)

The Center for Biomedical Sciences and Engineering was established in 2012 with the aim of combining researchers previously working at the Laboratory for Environmental Research with those who have recently joined UNG.

The goal of the Center is to build a cohesive research group focused on innovation in biomedical sciences. The group has developed several research priority areas, which together focus on our common interest – to jointly explore modern technologies in biomedicine, nanotechnology and engineering, and to develop new solutions for improving the quality of the aging process. We are involved in projects related to regenerative medicine and aging, cell biology mechanisms of pain, drug screening and drug discovery, toxicology, antibody-specific strategies against cancer, immunology, vaccines, nano-cell biology interfaces and nano-sensors. We offer functional screening approaches such as calcium imaging, microscopy, toxicology, cell expression platforms for gene characterization, molecular biology and signal-transduction studies in different in vitro models.

Competences/area of interest:
molecular mechanisms of cell aging and disease, degenerative disease, regenerative medicine and stem cells, tissue engineering.

Website: www.ung.si

The PROTEO group (Ario de Marco's Lab)

The PROTEO group operating at UNG (de Marco) is specialized in isolating and engineering single-domain recombinant antibodies (VHHs). Such binders are used as diagnostic devices in several combinations and can be adapted to different models. In the frame of the PROTEO project, VHHs specific for tumor biomarkers were first recovered and characterized for their binding features and successively produced in collaboration with the protein facility group at ELETTRA (Storici) with a free cysteine residue suitable for maleimide functionalization. These reagents were effectively exploited by the ELETTRA biophysics partner (Casalis) to build highly sensitive biosensors. Other VHH screening have been performed for the PROTEO groups at CIB (Demarchi) and at the University of Udine (Brancolini). In collaboration with the other partner in Udine (Cesselli), the UNG group started a very innovative panning approach directly on exosomes to identify binders useful for the immunocapture of these biologically critical microvesicles.