Nanotoxicology and Particle Toxicology

Nanotoxicology and Particle Toxicology: An Interview with Dr. Antonietta Gatti

 

Interview conducted by Alexander Chilton

Dr. Antonietta Gatti, Scientific Director of Nanodiagnostics, talked to AZoNano about her new book 'Case Studies in Nanotoxicology and Particle Toxicology' published by Elsevier Academic Press, 2015. 

AC: Could you provide our readers with a summary of how you became involved in the fields of nanotoxicology and particle toxicology?

AG: It’s a very long story that I will try to summarize as much as I can. At the beginning of the 90s, when I was the director of the Laboratory of Biomaterials of the University of Modena, a laboratory I had founded years before, my husband, Dr. Stefano Montanari, brought me a caval filter, a small device which is implanted in the inferior vena cava to prevent pulmonary thrombo-embolism. That filter had broken in vivo, had been explanted from the patient and the surgeon, a friend of my husband’s, wished to know why that device had failed(...)

After that, our story became more complicated, but what is important is that in 2002 the European Community put me in charge of a research project called Nanopathology. In that contest, together with a few partners among which the universities of Mainz and Cambridge, I could research much more in depth the phenomenon of solid micro- and nanoparticles entering the organism and causing a series of conditions I called nanopathologies, since their common origin was from micro- and nanoparticles.

Then, for a number of reasons, in the year 2004 my husband and I founded the laboratory Nanodiagnostics where we are still working. One year after, the European Commission put me in charge of another research project called DIPNA based on nano-eco-toxicology, i.e. the toxicological effects of very small particles.

An-vivo image of a cluster of nanoparticles surrounded human red blood cells of a person exposed to pollution.

AC: Could you summarise the current activity which is taking place within the field of Nanodiagnostics?

AG: We keep researching into solid, inorganic micro- and nanoparticles and the pathologies they induce. They can enter the organism mainly via inhalation and ingestion. If they are small enough, and they often are, they reach the pulmonary alveoli and, within a few tens of seconds, they enter the blood circulation. There, in a minority of subjects, they make the blood clot, thus causing pulmonary thrombo-embolism if the phenomenon occurs in the veins, stroke and infarction if it occurs in the arteries.

In most cases, the blood carries the particles virtually to any organ, and, no matter what the organ is, it behaves like a filter, capturing the particles without any possibility for them to be released or somehow eliminated. As happens with any small foreign body, those particles induce the formation of an inflammatory tissue that becomes chronic and, in the long run, can turn to a cancer. But particles can also cause diseases of the nervous system when they are captured by the brain or, when they interest other organs, probably hard-to-suspect pathologies like, for example, type-1 diabetes if their target has been the pancreas(...)

About Dr. Antonietta Gatti

Dr. Antonietta Gatti has an interdisciplinary background that ranges from physics, chemistry, biology, physiology and pathology. Dr. Gatti has 40 years of research experience in the field of biomaterials and biocompatibility at national and international levels in various capacities.

In 2002, Dr. Gatti was appointed as the coordinator of the European project called Nanopathology through which a new diagnostic tool was developed. The results of the project are described in her book Nanopathology, published by Pan Stanford Publishing (Singapore).

Dr. Gatti used scanning electron microscopy to identify nanoparticles in biological samples, organic matrices, in food, in water and in plants. The experience of Nanopathology led to a further European project called DIPNA (Nanotoxicology), to the Italian Projects BATNAN, INESE and VENAM of nanoecotoxicity.

Dr. Gatti is the author of about 210 articles in peer reviewed journals. She created the Laboratory of Biomaterials at the University of Modena. Currently she is a European authority in the fields of nanopathology (the human and animal pathologies triggered by micro and nanoparticles), nanotoxicology, nanoecotoxicology and environmental pollution.

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