Chiara Fedele, a postdoctoral researcher in SPM, makes inventions at the interface between materials chemistry and photonics to solve biological problems. Fedele is fascinated by the potential of functional light-responsive soft materials to improve human health. She suggests a smart light-controllable cell culture platform for drug testing as a more advanced and close-to-reality live model. The novelty of the system is integrated mechanobiology, i.e. cell culture undergoes a mechanic stress modelling the situation in animal/human body. The improved model system for drug discovery L-Cell may help to save money by decreasing the amount of failed drugs in later steps of animal/human studies.
Chiara Fedele's invention L-Cell for pharmaceutical industry’s R&D
L-cell (Light-reconfigurable Substrates for Cell Cultures) is smart light-controllable cell culture platform.