Nanotechnology allows the realization of new materials and devices with basic structural unit in the range of 1–100 nm and characterized by gaining control at the atomic, molecular, and supramolecular level. Reducing the dimensions of a material into the nanoscale range usually results in the change of its physiochemical properties such as reactivity, crystallinity, and solubility. This review treats the convergence of last research news at the interface of nanostructured biomaterials and tissue engineering for emerging biomedical technologies such as scaffolding and tissue regeneration. The present review is organized into three main sections. The introduction concerns an overview of the increasing utility of nanostructured materials in the field of tissue engineering. It elucidates how nanotechnology, by working in the submicron length scale, assures the realization of a biocompatible interface that is able to reproduce the physiological cell–matrix interaction. The second, more technical section, concerns the design and fabrication of biocompatible surface characterized by micro- and submicroscale features, using microfabrication, nanolithography, and miscellaneous nanolithographic techniques. In the last part, we review the ongoing tissue engineering application of nanostructured materials and scaffolds in different fields such as neurology, cardiology, orthopedics, and skin tissue regeneration.

In designing a new drug, considering the preferred route of administration, various requirements must be fulfilled. Active molecules pharmacokinetics should be reliable with a valuable drug profile as well as well-tolerated. Over the past 20 years, nanotechnologies have provided alternative and complementary solutions to those of an exclusively pharmaceutical chemical nature since scientists and clinicians invested in the optimization of materials and methods capable of regulating effective drug delivery at the nanometer scale. Among the many drug delivery carriers, lipid nano vesicular ones successfully support clinical candidates approaching such problems as insolubility, biodegradation, and difficulty in overcoming the skin and biological barriers such as the blood–brain one. In this review, the authors discussed the structure, the biochemical composition, and the drug delivery applications of lipid nanovesicular carriers, namely, niosomes, proniosomes, ethosomes, transferosomes, pharmacosomes, ufasomes, phytosomes, catanionic vesicles, and extracellular vesicles.

The spectral dependence of the two-photon absorption in CdSe/CdS core/shell nanocrystal heterorods has been studied via two-photon-induced luminescence excitation spectroscopy. We verified that the two-photon absorption in these samples is a purely nonlinear phenomenon, excluding the contribution from multistep linear absorption mediated by defect states. A large absorption cross section was observed for CdSe/CdS core/shell quantum rods, in the range of 10⁵ GM (1 GM = 10^–50 cm⁴ s phot^–1), scaling with the total nanocrystal volume and thus independent of the core emission wavelength. In the two-photon luminescence excitation spectra, peaks are strongly blue-shifted with respect to the one-photon absorption peaks, for both core and shell transitions. The experimental results are confirmed by k·p calculations, which attribute the shift to both different parity selection rules that apply to one-photon and two-photon transitions and a low oscillator strength for two-photon transitions close to the ground-state one-photon absorption. In contrast with lead chalcogenide quantum dots, we found no evidence of a breakdown of the optical selection rules, despite the presence of band anisotropy, via the anisotropic hole masses, and the explicitly induced reduction of the electron wave function symmetry via the rod shape of the shell. The anisotropy does lead to an unexpected splitting of the electron P-states in the case of a large CdSe core encapsulated in a thin CdS shell. Hence, tuning of the core and shell dimensions and the concurrent transition from type I to quasi-type II carrier localization enables unprecedented control over the band-edge two-photon absorption.

The DNA helix and its internal structures were directly imaged; characteristic lengths and inner components were measured and reported.

Mesoporous materials are structures characterized by a well-ordered large pore system with uniform porous dimensions ranging between 2 and 50 nm. Typical samples are zeolite, carbon molecular sieves, porous metal oxides, organic and inorganic porous hybrid and pillared materials, silica clathrate and clathrate hydrates compounds. Improvement in biochemistry and materials science led to the design and implementation of different types of porous materials ranging from rigid to soft two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) skeletons. The present review focuses on the use of three-dimensional printed (3DP) mesoporous scaffolds suitable for a wide range of drug delivery applications, due to their intrinsic high surface area and high pore volume. In the first part, the importance of the porosity of materials employed for drug delivery application was discussed focusing on mesoporous materials. At the end of the introduction, hard and soft templating synthesis for the realization of ordered 2D/3D mesostructured porous materials were described. In the second part, 3DP fabrication techniques, including fused deposition modelling, material jetting as inkjet printing, electron beam melting, selective laser sintering, stereolithography and digital light processing, electrospinning, and two-photon polymerization were described. In the last section, through recent bibliographic research, a wide number of 3D printed mesoporous materials, for in vitro and in vivo drug delivery applications, most of which relate to bone cells and tissues, were presented and summarized in a table in which all the technical and bibliographical details were reported. This review highlights, to a very cross-sectional audience, how the interdisciplinarity of certain branches of knowledge, as those of materials science and nano-microfabrication are, represent a growing valuable aid in the advanced forum for the science and technology of pharmaceutics and biopharmaceutics.