Gianluca Ciardelli

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• Ph.D
• Professor (Full) at Polytechnic University of Turin

Recurrent catheter‐associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) in catheterized patients, increase their morbidity and hospital stay at substantial costs for healthcare systems. Hence, novel and efficient strategies for mitigating CAUTIs are needed. In this work, a bio‐based nanocomposite coating is engineered with bactericidal, antibiofilm, and an...

Haematological malignancies comprise a diverse group of life-threatening systemic diseases, including leukaemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. Currently available therapies, including chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and CAR-T cells, are often associated with important side effects and with the development of drug resistance and, consequently, diseas...

Background/Objectives: Chronic skin wounds (CSWs) are a worldwide healthcare problem with relevant impacts on both patients and healthcare systems. In this context, innovative treatments are needed to improve tissue repair and patient recovery and quality of life. Cord blood platelet lysate (CB-PL) holds great promise in CSW treatment thanks to its...

In situ-forming hydrogels based on the Schiff-base chemistry are promising for drug delivery applications, thanks to their stability under physiological conditions, injectability, self-healing properties, and pH-responsiveness. In this work, two water-soluble poly(ethylene glycol)-based poly(ether urethane)s (PEUs) were engineered. A high-molecular...

Smart self-defensive antibacterial coatings that respond to internal bacteria triggers are a powerful and promising tool in the fight against medical device-related bacterial infections.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most common type of pancreatic cancer, a leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally. Initial lesions of PDAC develop within the exocrine pancreas’ functional units, with tumor progression driven by interactions between PDAC and stromal cells. Effective therapies require anatomically and functional...

Efficient tumour treatment is hampered by the poor selectivity of anticancer drugs, resulting in scarce tumour accumulation and undesired off-target effects. Nano-sized drug-delivery systems in the form of nanoparticles (NPs) have been proposed to improve drug distribution to solid tumours, by virtue of their ability of passive and active tumour ta...

Physical and chemical hydrogels are promising platforms for tissue engineering/regenerative medicine (TERM). In particular, physical hydrogels are well-suitable to design drug delivery systems due to their reversibility and responsiveness to...

Catheter-associated urinary tract infections represent a major share of nosocomial infections, and are associated with longer periods of hospitalization and a huge financial burden. Currently, there are only a handful of commercial materials that reduce biofilm formation on urinary catheters, mostly relying on silver alloys. Therefore, we combined...

Catheter-associated urinary tract infections are the most common hospital-acquired infections and cause patient discomfort, increased morbidity, and prolonged stays, altogether posing a huge burden on healthcare services. Colonization occurs upon insertion, or later by ascending microbes from the rich periurethral flora, and is therefore virtually...

Several diseases affect the alveoli, and the efficacy of medical treatments and pharmaceutical therapies is hampered by the lack of pre-clinical models able to recreate in vitro the diseases. Microfluidic devices, mimicking the key structural and compositional features of the alveoli, offer several advantages to medium and high-throughput analysis...

In normal chronic wound healing pathways, the presence of strong and persistent inflammation states characterized by high Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) concentrations is one of the major concerns hindering tissue regeneration. The administration of different ROS scavengers has been investigated over the years, but their effectiveness has been stron...

Alveoli are the functional area of respiratory system where the gaseous exchanges take place at level of the alveolar-capillary barrier. The development of safe and effective therapeutic approaches for treating lung disease is currently limited due to the lack of realistic preclinical models for their testing and validation. In this work, tissue en...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fcell.2023.1125801.].

Chronic wounds (CWs) are a growing issue for the health care system. Their treatment requires a synergic approach to reduce both inflammation and the bacterial burden. In this work, a promising system for treating CWs was developed, comprising cobalt-lignin nanoparticles (NPs) embedded in a supramolecular (SM) hydrogel. First, NPs were obtained thr...

Over the past years a growing number of studies highlighted the pivotal role of intracellular trafficking in cell physiology. Among the distinct transport itineraries connecting the endocytic system, both internalization (endocytosis) and recycling (endocytic recycling) pathways were found fundamental to ensure cellular sensing, cell-to-cell commun...

Temperature and light responsiveness are widely exploited stimuli to tune the physico-chemical properties of double network hydrogels. In this work, new amphiphilic poly(ether urethane)s bearing photo-sensitive moieties (i.e., thiol, acrylate and norbornene functionalities) were engineered by exploiting the versatility of poly(urethane) chemistry a...

Bacterial infections are a growing concern to the health care systems. Bacteria in the human body are often found embedded in a dense 3D structure, the biofilm, which makes their eradication even more challenging. Indeed, bacteria in biofilm are protected from external hazards and are more prone to develop antibiotic resistance. Moreover, biofilms...

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most frequent type of pancreatic cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. PDAC is marked by a dense, fibrous tumor microenvironment, in which stromal fibroblasts surround the cancerous ductal epithelial cells. The crosstalk between pancreatic cells and the surrounding fibro...

Bioartificial hydrogels are hydrophilic systems extensively studied for regenerative medicine due to the synergic combination of features of synthetic and natural polymers. Injectability is another crucial property for hydrogel mini-invasive administration. This work aimed at engineering injectable bioartificial in situ cross-linkable hydrogels by...

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) mainly develops in the head of the pancreas, within the acino-ductal unit composed of acinar and ductal cells surrounded by pancreatic stellate cells (PSCs). PSCs strongly influence the tumor microenvironment by triggering an intense stromal deposition, which plays a key role in tumor progression and limits d...

An injectable delivery platform for promoting delayed bone healing has been developed by combining a thermosensitive polyurethane-based hydrogel with strontium-substituted mesoporous bioactive glasses (MBG_Sr) for the long-term and localized co-delivery of pro-osteogenic Sr²⁺ ions and an osteogenesis-enhancing molecule, N-Acetylcysteine (NAC). The...

A deeply interconnected flexible transducer of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):polystyrenesulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) was obtained as a material for the application of soft robotics. Firstly, transducers were developed by crosslinking PEDOT:PSS with 3-glycidyloxypropryl-trimethoxysilane (GPTMS) (1, 2 and 3% v/v) and using...

After urinary stenting, patients often suffer from mid- and long-term complications, such as infections, bacterial colonization, encrustations, or stent obstruction which are related to the design, materials and surface properties of the stent. Drug eluting stents (DES) is an advance technology that can reduce the morbidity associated with stenting...

In recent years, 3D printing techniques experienced a growing interest in several sectors, including the biomedical one. Their main advantage resides in the possibility to obtain complex and personalized structures in a cost‐effective way impossible to achieve with traditional production methods. This is especially true for Fused Deposition Modelin...

Chronic skin wounds affect more than 40 million patients globally and represent a severe growing burden for the healthcare systems, with annual costs expected to exceed $15 billions by 2022. To satisfy the huge demand for effective wound care products, different types of wound dressings have been introduced on the market during the last decades. Ba...

Effective management of hard-to-close skin wounds is a challenging issue due to several co-morbidities in affected patients. Particularly, infections represent a major obstacle in wound healing. The design of efficient wound treatments thus represents an urgent need. Injectable drug delivery hydrogels with intrinsic antimicrobial and antifungal pro...

Introduction: Highly resistant bacteria and fungi in particular have led to an international resistance crisis in recent decades, which was relatively underestimated for a long time. At the same time, the development of new antibiotics and antimycotics was criminally cut back. This seriously jeopardises the maintenance of modern high-performance me...

The replication method is a widely used technique to produce bioactive glass (BG) scaffolds mimicking trabecular bone. However, these scaffolds usually exhibit poor mechanical reliability and fast degradation, which can be improved by coating them with a polymer. In this work, we proposed the use of custom-made poly(urethane)s (PURs) as coating mat...

Editorial on the Research Topic Combating Bacterial Infections Through Biomimetic or Bioinspired Materials Design and Enabling Technologies

Ureteral stents are broadly used for the treatment of a wide range of pathologies, with different complexities and characteristics. Despite being efficient, the morbidity associated with stents, such as bacterial infection and pain, limits their therapeutic action and often represents an increase in healthcare costs. As no single solution fits all...

The rapidly increasing resistance of bacteria to currently approved antibiotic drugs makes surgical interventions and the treatment of bacterial infections increasingly difficult. In recent years, complementary strategies to classical antibiotic therapy have, therefore, gained importance. One of these strategies is the use of medicinal honey in the...

The design and fabrication of a system to both mimic the multicellular composition of the lung and its vascular network, as well as the composition and structure of extracellular matrix (ECM) was developed.

This project aims at reproducing the morphology and the composition of the pancreatic acino-ductal unit. More specifically, this work involves the use of additive manufacturing technologies to fabricate a 3D exocrine glandular tissue model that mimics in vitro the physiological structure experienced by cells in vivo.

This project aims at reproducing the morphology and the composition of the pancreatic acino-ductal unit. More specifically, this work involves the use of additive manufacturing technologies to fabricate a 3D exocrine glandular tissue model that mimics in vitro the physiological structure experienced by cells in vivo.

The definition of the term “biomaterial” dates back to 1991, during the 2nd Consensus Conference on the Definitions in Biomaterials organized by the European Society of Biomaterials in Chester (UK) [...]

Guided tissue regeneration (GTR) procedures to treat periodontitis lesions making use of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) membranes exhibit large variability in their surgical outcomes, due to bacterial infection following implantation. This work reports on a facile method to obtain antimicrobial coatings for such PTFE membranes, by exploiting a muss...

A strategy to enhance drug effectiveness while minimizing controversial effects consists in exploiting host-guest interactions. Moreover, these phenomena can induce the self-assembly of physical hydrogels as effective tools to treat various pathologies (e.g., chronic wounds or cancer). Here, two Poloxamers®/Pluronics® (P407/F127 and P188/F68) were...

Nowadays, human skin constructs (HSCs) are required for biomaterials, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics in vitro testing and for the development of complex skin wound therapeutics. In vitro three-dimensional (3D) dermal-epidermal based interfollicular, full-thickness, human skin equivalent (HSE) was here developed, recapitulating skin morphogenesis, ep...

Conductive polymers (CPs) have recently been applied in the development of scaffolds for tissue engineering applications in attempt to induce additional cues able to enhance tissue growth. Polyaniline (PANI) is one of the most widely studied CPs, but it requires to be blended with other polymers in order to be processed through conventional technol...

The design of multi-stimuli-responsive vehicles for the controlled and localized release of drugs is a challenging issue increasingly catching the attention of many research groups working on the advanced treatment of hard-to-close wounds. In this work, a thermo- and pH-responsive hydrogel (P-CHP407) was prepared from an ad hoc synthesized amphiphi...

Abdominal hernia repair is a frequently performed surgical procedure worldwide. Currently, the use of polypropylene (PP) surgical meshes for the repair of abdominal hernias constitutes the primary surgical approach, being widely accepted as superior to primary suture repair. Surgical meshes act as a reinforcement for the weakened or damaged tissues...

Intratumoral drug delivery is a promising approach for the treatment of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). However, drug washout remains a major challenge in GBM therapy. Our strategy, aimed at reducing drug clearance and enhancing site-specific residence time, involves the local administration of a multi-component system comprised of nanoparticles (NP...

Due to its hydroxyl terminal groups, Poloxamer ® 407 (P407), a commercially available poly(ethylene oxide)-poly(propylene oxide)-poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO-PPO-PEO) triblock copolymer can be used as macrodiol for the synthesis of high molecular weight amphiphilic poly(ether urethane)s (PEUs). This work was aimed at studying the effect of P407 purifi...

Defining the best combination of cells and biomaterials is a key challenge for the development of tendon tissue engineering (TE) strategies. Adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) are ideal candidates for this purpose. In addition, controlled cell-based products adherent to good manufacturing practice (GMP) are required for their clinical scale-up. With...

Electrospun membranes have been widely used as scaffolds for soft tissue engineering due to their extracellular matrix-like structure. A mussel-inspired coating approach based on 3,4-dihydroxy-DL-phenylalanine (DOPA) polymerization was proposed to graft gelatin (G) onto poly(lactic-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA) electrospun membranes. PolyDOPA coating al...

In the era of personalised medicine, novel therapeutic approaches raise increasing hopes to address currently unmet medical needs by developing patient-customised treatments. Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting is rapidly evolving and has the potential to obtain personalised tissue constructs and overcome some limitations of standard tissue engineer...

Flexible strain sensors are fundamental devices for application in human body monitoring in areas ranging from health care to soft robotics. Stretchable piezoelectric strain sensors received an ever-increasing interest to design novel, robust and low-cost sensing units for these sensors, with intrinsically conductive polymers (ICPs) as leading mate...

The high drug loading capacity, cytocompatibility and easy functionalization of ordered mesoporous carbons (OMCs) make them attractive nanocarriers to treat several pathologies. OMCs’ efficiency could be further increased by embedding them into a hydrogel phase for an in loco prolonged drug release. In this work, OMCs were embedded into injectable...

Reduced periodontal support, deriving from chronic inflammatory conditions, such as periodontitis, is one of the main causes of tooth loss. The use of dental implants for the replacement of missing teeth has attracted growing interest as a standard procedure in clinical practice. However, adequate bone volume and soft tissue augmentation at the sit...

The development of new bio-based inks is a stringent request for the expansion of additive manufacturing towards the development of 3D-printed biocompatible hydrogels. Herein, methacrylated carboxymethyl cellulose (M-CMC) is investigated as a bio-based photocurable ink for digital light processing (DLP) 3D printing. CMC is chemically modified using...

The design of supramolecular hydrogels based on host-guest complexes represents an effective strategy to develop drug delivery systems. In this work, we designed SM hydrogels based on α-cyclodextrin and high-molar mass amphiphilic poly(ether urethane)s (PEUs, Mn 27 kDa) based on Poloxamer® 407 and differing in their chain extender. The successful f...

Injectable therapeutic formulations locally releasing their cargo with tunable kinetics in response to external biochemical/physical cues are gaining interest in the scientific community, with the aim to overcome the cons of traditional administration routes. In this work, we proposed an alternative solution to this challenging goal by combining th...

Piezoelectric ceramic nanomaterials have recently attracted attention in the biomedical field thanks to their interesting electrical properties in response to mechanical stimulation (and vice versa) combined with a good biocompatibility and the ability to promote the regeneration of electrically sensitive tissues. In tissue engineering approaches,...

Wound infections constitute an increasing clinical problem worldwide. To reverse this trend, several wound dressings with antimicrobial properties have been developed. Considering the increasing presence of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms, product developers have been focusing their efforts in introducing antibiotic-free antibacterial wound dre...

3D tissue-engineered models are promising tools in the screening and evaluation of drugs and therapies as well as in the investigation of the molecular mechanisms involved in disease onset and progression. In this context, we describe our efforts in soft tissue replication, to design in vitro models that have the potential to provide better insight...

Recent progresses in tissue engineering are directed towards the development of technologies able to provide personalized scaffolds recreating the defect shape in a patient specific manner. To achieve this ambitious goal, 3D bioprinting can be combined with a suitable bioink, able to create a physiological milieu for cell growth. In this work, a no...

Plasma treatment is a widely applied, easy, fast, and highly reproducible surface modification technique. In this work powder plasma treatment was exploited to expose carboxylic groups along the backbone of a water soluble polymer. Specifically, a custom-made amphiphilic poly(ether urethane) containing Poloxamer® 407 blocks (Mw = 54,000 Da) was fir...

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma has the worst outcome among all cancer types, with a 5-year survival rate as low as 10%. The lethal nature of this cancer is a result of its silent onset, resistance to therapies, and rapid spreading. As a result, most patients remain asymptomatic and present at diagnosis with an already infiltrating and incurable disease....

During the past few decades, thiomers have attracted interest as responsive-polymers in the design of smart hydrogels, due to thiol reactivity to physical stimuli (i.e., pH, oxygen, UV/Vis irradiation). However, thiomer potentialities have been limited by their low thiolation degree and lack of multi-responsiveness to physical cues. In this work, a...

Articular cartilage (AC) lacks the ability to self-repair and cell-based approaches, primarily based on using chondrocytes and mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), are emerging as effective technology to restore cartilage functionality, because cells synergic functionality may support the maintenance of chondrogenic phenotype and promote extracellular ma...

Mini-invasively injectable hydrogels are widely attracting interest as smart tools for the co-delivery of therapeutic agents targeting different aspects of tissue/organ healing (e.g., neo-angiogenesis, inflammation). In this work, copper-substituted bioactive mesoporous glasses (Cu-MBGs) were prepared as nano- and micro-particles and successfully l...

Scaffold pore size plays a fundamental role in the regeneration of new tissue since it has been shown to direct cell activity in situ. It is well known that cellular response changes in relation with pores diameter. Consequently, researchers developed efficient approaches to realize scaffolds with controllable macro‐, micro‐, and nanoporous archite...

The characteristic poor stability and high fluid permeability of Poloxamer®- based gels have severely limited their biomedical application. In this work, Poloxamer 407 was used as building block to synthesize a poly(ether urethane) (PEU), which aqueous solutions formed gels with improved stability and mechanics compared to Poloxamer itself. PEU cha...

In this study we examined the potential of novel biodegradable polymers of polyesterurethane (PU), and its PEGylated (PU-PEG) form as nanocarriers of Infliximab (INF), to treat inflammation in an in-vitro epithelial model. Nanoparticles (NPs) formulated were of average size of 200–287 nm. INF loading of NPs (INF-NPs) resulted in an increase in size...

A major burden of the healthcare system resides in providing proper medical treatment for all types of chronic wounds, which are usually treated with dressings to induce a faster regeneration. Hence, to reduce healing time and improve the patient’s quality of life, it is extremely important to select the most appropriate constituent material for a...

Poly(L-lactic) acid (PLLA) has been widely employed in tissue engineering due to its mechanical properties, biodegradability and biocompatibility. The layer-by-layer (LbL) technique was here proposed as a simple method to impart bioactivity to the surface of PLLA substrates. Aminolysis treatment was applied to introduce amino groups on the surface...

Adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) are multipotent and immune-privileged mesenchymal cells, making them ideal candidates for therapeutic purposes to manage tendon disorders. Providing safe and regulated cell therapy products to patients requires adherence to good manufacturing practices. To this aim we investigated the in vitro tenogenic differentia...

Abstract Book: Drug-Free Antibacterial Technology for Medical Applications - First Cambridge International Conference - December 14th, 2018 - Cambridge, UK

Aims . Synthetic meshes are the long-standing choice for the clinical treatment of abdominal wall hernias: the associated long-term complications have stimulated the development of a new generation of bioresorbable prostheses. In this work, polycaprolactone (PCL) porous membranes prepared by solvent casting/porogen leaching of PCL/poly(ethylene gly...

A bacterial colonized human skin equivalent (c-HSE) The aim of this study was the development of a human skin model and human skin wound infection model for the bio-evaluation of antimicrobial biomaterials intended for wound healing purposes. The three-dimensional in vitro models will represent advanced and complex systems to perform more reliable...

A bacterial colonized human skin equivalent (c-HSE) The aim of this study was the development of a human skin model and human skin wound infection model for the bio-evaluation of antimicrobial biomaterials intended for wound healing purposes. The three-dimensional in vitro models will represent advanced and complex systems to perform more reliable...

In the present work, a new combination of synthetic and natural biomaterials is proposed for bone tissue engineering (BTE) applications. In order to mimic the inorganic and organic phases of bone extracellular matrix (ECM), a bioactive glass-ceramic deriving from a SiO2–P2O5–CaO–MgO–Na2O–K2O parent glass, acting as a substrate in form of a slice, w...

The Quartz Crystal Microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) is a tool to measure mass and viscosity in processes occurring at or near surfaces, or within thin films. QCM-D is able to detect extremely small chemical, mechanical, and electrical changes taking place on the sensor surface and to convert them into electrical signals which can be...

Three-dimensional (3D) tissue models offer new tools in the study of diseases. In the case of the engineering of the cardiac muscle, a realistic goal would be the design of a scaffold able to replicate the tissue-specific architecture, mechanical properties and chemical composition, so that it recapitulates the main functions of the tissue. This wo...

Cancer therapy often relies on the combined action of different molecules to overcome drug resistance and enhance patient outcome. Combined strategies relying on molecules with different pharmacokinetics often fail due to the lack of concomitant tumor accumulation and, thus, in the loss of synergistic effect. Due to their ability to enhance treatme...

Hypothesis: Wound healing is a complex process that often requires treatment with antibacterial agents to avoid infection, which affects the optimal tissue regeneration process. Ideal scaffolds for wound healing treatment should combine biomimetic features to ensure the tissue growth on properly designed extracellular matrix (ECM)-like scaffolds a...

Scaffolds populated with human cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs) represent a therapeutic opportunity for heart regeneration after myocardial infarction. In this work, square-grid scaffolds are prepared by melt-extrusion additive manufacturing from a polyurethane (PU), further subjected to plasma treatment for acrylic acid surface grafting/polymerizat...

Photos of scaffolds after TBO assay. Typical aspect of untreated PU control scaffolds (PU) and plasma treated PU scaffolds (Plasma-treated PU) after TBO colorimetric assay. (TIF)