Micro- and nanostructured devices for medical diagnosis, food analysis, “organs-on-chips” and tissue engineering.

The development of fast, reliable and high-throughput screening tools deserves the attention of research in the fields of medical diagnostics, food safety, toxicology and ultimately of the industry in order to protect the human health. In this framework, micro- and nano-scale approaches are powerful technologies, which offer numerous analytical advantages such as short analysis time, high efficiency and small volumes used. Examples include miniaturized polymerase chain reaction (PCR) platform, consisting in hybrid architectures employed to perform nested PCR on predictive markers for cancer diagnosis. In addition, microfluidic chips have been successfully used to identify the presence in foodstuff of biogenic amines, a class of organic bases with potential adverse effects on the human health. Among the advantages of microfluidic-based devices, the physical dimensions of microchannels, comparable with the cell size, make them ideal systems to study and manipulate cells, in the so-called ‘‘organs-on-a-chip’’, namely engineered microfluidic devices re-creating in vitro the structural arrangements and biological functions of living organs. Finally, micro- and nanofabrication techniques allow the design of scaffolds mimicking the structural complexity of the extracellular matrix, including its specialized textured topography both at the micro and nano-range, which can significantly affect the stem cell growth and fate.