BCMaterials Fortnightly Seminar #93 Marc Avila

MARC AVILA

(BCMATERIALS)

Assessment of thin-film magnetic sensors for the detection of magnetotactic bacteria

The battle against cancer is in the vanguard of the science. The last investigations consider that one of the solution of current cancer therapies could be the nanoparticles as a vehicle of drugs. This work is a small part of an ambitious project,”Magnetotactic bacteria as sources of model magnetic nanoparticles and biorobots for targeted therapies”, that proposes to use the magnetotactic bacteria for biomedical applications, in particular as an alternative for drug delivery and hyperthermia therapies. This kind of bacteria synthesize nanoparticles from the iron found in their environment and use them to navigate along magnetic field lines. The mentioned project aims to use the magnetotctic bacteria as biorobots guided by external magnetic fields towards the desired point inside the body. It will be interesting to detect the bacteria with magnetic sensors for monitoring the magnetotactic bacteria routes taking advantage of the finite fields created by the chain of the nanoparticles o the bacteria. This master thesis arises as a part of this project with the aim of researching the limits the detection capability of state-of-art magnetoimpedance (MI) thin-film sensors using different electronic devices: Network Analyzer and Power Meter. The results confirm the feasibility of measuring fields down to 0.5 μT, which is the order of the magnetic field created by the bacteria.

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