BCMaterials Fortnightly Seminar #79 Javier Alonso - Ana María Schönhöbel

JAVIER ALONSO

(BCMATERIALS)

Exosome Enrichment in Blood Biopsies via Nanowire Tags

A new method of early cancer detection is proposed to improve the efficacy of blood biopsies via magnetic separation of exosomes, which are vesicles secreted into the blood by cells for communication with each other and with their environment. Cancer cells, for example, appear to use exosomes to survive and metastasize to other tissues. Current methods for cancer detection and analysis are mostly based on tissue biopsies, which are expensive and often unreliable in the early stages of cancer. Because exosomes contain materials that are unique to each cell, they can provide us information about the state of tumor cells. But separating exomes is expensive and time consuming. Also, since all the cells in body release exosomes, it can be challenging to separate the exosomes released by cancer cells. To overcome this obstacle, we propose to use magnetic nanowires (MNWs) for separation of the exosomes.

ANA MARÍA SCHÖNHÖBEL

(BCMATERIALS)

Magnetic properties of new series Sm1-xNdxFe11V (x=0, 0.2, 0.4) with ThMn12 type structure.

Motivated by the discovery of Nd2Fe14B, global efforts have started to search for new compounds among the ternary alloys, which might serve as alternatives for starting materials in permanent magnet applications. One of the series of novel ternary intermetallics that have emerged from this search is the RFe12-xMx -type compounds which crystallize in a tetragonal ThMn12 structure. The purpose of this talk is to report the intrinsic magnetic properties of Sm1-xNdxFe11V alloy (x=0, 0.2, 0.4). X-ray diffraction showed that these materials crystallize in the tetragonal ThMn12 structure and particularly the SmFe11V has shown uniaxial anisotropy. Also the Curie temperature is reported and from high-field magnetic measurements made at room temperature on aligned powders it was derived that the anisotropy field is about 12 T.