Micro4Nano will design, optimize, and produce a new generation of highly efficient, photostable, biocompatible, and fluorescent nanocarriers for bioimaging. This unique tool will allow for multicolor detection and consequently enable the reconstruction of complex and functional images in the study of drug delivery.

In addition, this highly ambitious project aims to develop methods for 3D visualization up to 1 mm in depth, combining hyperspectral imaging of auto-fluorescent species with structural information from second-harmonic generation signals and multifunctional fluorescent labels, as well as chemical information from Raman microscopy.

Micro4Nano will also create a new generation of multifunctional nanocarriers for two-photon microscopy, and drug delivery will be designed for real-time monitoring of living cells and tissues.

In this consortium of 11 partners, the Microfluidics Innovation Center (MIC) brings its expertise on cell culture in microfluidics devices to design tissue-on-chip platforms. We will primarily participate in designing and testing microfluidic setups for automated tissue, defining flow control parameters to reproduce the native cell environment optimally. 

The highly reproducible tissue culture environment will be exploited to study drug delivery at the single-cell level using Raman and two-photon microscopy.