Alf Garcia-bennett

Biography

I completed my PhD thesis in 2003 at St. Andrews University (Scotland) on the Synthesis and Characterization of Mesoporous materials and their application in catalysis under the supervision of Professor Paul Wright. I continued my career at the University of Tohoku (Sendai, Japan) where I focused on the structural characterization of porous materials by electron microscopy and electron crystallography. I followed my post-doctoral supervisor Professor Osamu Terasaki from Japan to Sweden, where I continued my research at Stockholm University. In 2005 I became Assistant Professor at the Department of Nanotechnology and Functional Materials of Uppsala University (Sweden). I am active in the research field of mesoporous materials and their application, having written numerous articles on this topic, several patents as well as supervised four PhD thesis. I am the co-founder of Nanologica AB (Stockholm 2004) a company which commercializes mesoporous materials in the pharmaceutical sector as drug delivery vehicles and as separation media. Since February 2015 I am a senior research fellow at the ARC Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP) and a member of the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Science of Macquarie University. In December 2015 I was awarded a ARC Future Fellowship in order to study how the intrinsic physico-chemical properties of nanoparticles translate into biological properties through their interaction with physiological proteins in the body. I have experience with the characterization of nanostructured materials with a variety of advanced techniques including transmission and scanning electron microscopy, gas adsorption and x-ray diffraction. My work thus also includes development these techniques.

Research Interest

My main research interests are in combining Supramolecular and Inorganic Chemistry with Biological Sciences. These fields are central in application areas of significant economic impact such as the pharmaceutical sciences, catalysis, biotechnologies, nanomedicine etc. My research aims are to uncover the factors that govern the interaction(s) between inorganic particles and biological molecules. We want to know how nanostructured materials can be used to design and control such interactions. The biological behaviour of nanoparticles within the body is determined by a particle-specific identity card composed of adsorbed protein layers rapidly forming in contact with human plasma or cellular media. Understanding how these layers are formed, how to read them; and how the body interprets these fundamental signals is critical for the realisation of nanomedicine based therapies during the next decades. We are thus interested on the protein corona as a tool to direct the behaviour of nanoparticles, utilising cutting edge imaging techniques such as electron microscopy to address the lack of mechanistic information on the relation between the nanoparticle surface and its biological interactions. Working at the interface between Material Chemistry and Biology provides opportunities for new materials with properties of inorganic and biological character, e.g. biological recognition, efficiency at the nanoscale, adaptability and self-replication. Such materials may recognize and confine molecules from external media, or trigger adequate biological responses mimicking receptor mediated processes in cell membranes. They may also have new chiral and optical properties. We have recently reported several nanostructured materials based on supramolecular interactions between biological molecules (for example folates or nucleotides) confined within inorganic surfaces (such as mesoporous silica). We have studied their immune-adjuvant properties, their use for in vivo differentiation of stem cells, in drug delivery, and for the oral confinement of lipase enzymes which may lead to new strategies for the treatment of obesity.