Electromagnetism, Nanotechnologies and Biology: New Challenges and Opportunities

The lecture reviews the possibilities offered by the advent of Nanothecnologies for regulating the interaction between Electromagnetic Fields and Biosystems with unprecedented flexibility and specificity. In particular, we discuss how the exploitation of Magnetic Nanoparticles can lead to significant advances in clinical and diagnostic applications, and to the opening of a completely new scenario: the true remote control of nanomachines and biological systems. From a biological perspective, two crucial challenges exist, which could hamper the actual achievement of these goals in vivo: toxicity issues and the actual capability of selectively delivering the right amount of nanoparticle to the right biological target. During this talk, the results recently obtained and the attempt made to face both tasks will be discussed.