Novel Hybrid nano-phages for nanotechnology applications

There is urgent need for more efficient therapeutic and diagnostic tools, especially for hard-to-treat diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Nanomedicine hold great promises for its potential to overcome current "technological "limitations often leading to treatments-related adverse effects and late diagnosis. Nevertheless, there is a lack of translation between in vitro and in vivo results, in good part due to inefficient targeting in real complex biological environment, crowded with biomolecules that can coat the NPs and mask their synthetic functionalities. For these reasons protein/antibody grafting is often employed to improve the target recognition efficacy, however involving high costs, difficult scale up and poor stability. Here, we propose an alternative strategy, employing M13 bacteriophages as biological vector/probe to drive NPs delivery and interactions. Phages, largely present in our biofluids, exhibit well-known targeting ability in complex biological environments, high stability, low-costs, and can be easily engineered to display multiple highly specific peptides/nanobodies. In the present study we evaluated AuNPs-M13 interactions, we report the possibility to for AuNPs-phage self-assembly, and we established and employ an advanced characterization platform involving a large panel of techniques necessary for an in depth understanding of these systems showing the formation of a peculiar head-tail nanostructure. In addition, we analyzed how the NPs can affect the wilt type (WT) M13 biological behavior. This works is a fundamental milestone to the potential future applications of NP-virus hybrids for diagnostics, imaging and therapeutic purpose.