The Side effects of chemotherapy in cancer treatments are unavoidable due to the lack of anticancer drug’s specificity and it has a painful impact on patient quality of life. Over the past 30 years, increasing efforts is done to optimize chemotherapy dosing to reduce drug toxicity while increasing its efficacy. A new study proves stem cells can act as a drug reservoir and they will release anticancer drug in its original form in nearby area of cancer cells. Stem cells, due to their capacity to uptake drug, can control the drug toxicity. Dental Pulp Stem Cells DPSCs are able to uptake Paclitaxel PTX and could release it in the culture medium gradually. The conditioned culture medium (culture medium plus released PTX from DPSC) is transferred to the breast cancer cells MCF7. Visualizing the drug uptake intracellular could provide us mechanism of action of the drug. Confocal Raman microscopy as a noninvasive label free method is being used to trace drugs intracellular [1,2]. Applying Confocal Raman Microscopy, anticancer drug uptake by MCF7 is imaged. Surprisingly MCF7 - without any direct contact with PTX- showed drug uptake. It proves the stem cells carry and deliver anticancer drug without its modification. It could be a revolution in chemotherapy to avoid the side effects and increase the drug efficacy.[1] H. Salehi et al. Label-free detection of anticancer drug paclitaxel in living cells by Confocal Raman Microscopy. Applied physics letter. 2013, 102, 113701.[2] H. Salehi et al. Confocal Raman data analysis to comparison of apoptotic and non-apoptotic MCF-7 cells caused by anticancer drug paclitaxel. Journal of Biomedical Optics. 2013,18(5), 056010.

We investigated bone regeneration in vitro and in vivo, using porous silicon (pSi) microparticles coupled with nacre proteins. We prepared a composite powder formed by pSi particles loaded with phosphate, and nacre proteins carrying calcium. For in vitro experiments, we used primary culture of human Dental Pulp Stem Cells. Results showed efficiency for both cell adhesion, cell differentiation and CaPO4 formation. But the most interesting results were that this composite was highly efficient to regenerate bone in vivo, even without any additional stem cells grafting.

We are interested in the early stage diagnosis of H2B, a clinically important autoantigen in various severe illnesses (can-cers, systemic lupus, rheumatoid arthritis). Accordingly, we have developed a porous-silicon (PSi) based enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for sensitive detection of H2B antibodies, where H2B antigen were bound to a Si binding 12mer peptide [1] that act as an efficient linker to the surface. The proposed method is a simple, inexpensive sensing meth-od employing a PSi photonic substrate, a material affinity peptide, and a smart phone CCD detector to achieve a 100-fold (~ 10 fg/ml) increase in sensitivity compared to the standard ELISA (0.01 -0.1 ng/ml).

Mineralization of calcium phosphate crystals was examined on porous silicon (PSi) scaffolds with respect to the dependence of crystal formation on the average pore size of PSi. PSi multilayer wafers fabricated by electrochemical etching were moni- tored via their reflectivity spectra over time in a biologically relevant osteogenic solution. The evolution of the mean refractive index of the PSi scaffold is the signature of the in situ crystals nucleation within the pores. Crystals were then characterized using atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Raman micro-spectroscopy. The results in- dicate that the average pore size of PSi highly influences nucleation and crystal formation.

In this work, a combination of optical and electrochemical studies are performed in order to elaborate a suitable porous silicon (PSi) substrate for biosensing and biomaterial applications. We report on the electrochemical behavior of PSi multilayer stabilized by thermal oxidation, applying electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and cyclic voltammetry measurements. The strength of the method is evidenced when adsorption of small (12-mer) peptides is monitored. Our aim is to combine the advantages offered by the large sensing area of the PSi multilayers and the high sensitivity of the electrochemical technique for improved biosensing.

Heat and photochemical reactions with human hemoglobin and photosensitizer were monitored by holography interference method in gelatin phantom. The method has successfully facilitated monitoring the reactions as a high- resolution refraction index mapping in real time video regime. Methylene Blue was exploited as a photosensitizer. Keywords: Holographic Interferometry, imaging, photodynamic therapy, photochemical reactions