Dr. María J. Vicent received her Ph.D. degree in 2001 in chemistry after her research on solid supports from the Universitat Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) after several scientific stays in the laboratory of Prof. Fréchet’s lab. at the University California (Berkeley, USA). María then moved into more biomedically-oriented research, initially with the Spanish company Instituto Biomar S.A., and subsequently at the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics at the University of Cardiff (UK) with Prof. R. Duncan after receiving a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, María joined the Prince Felipe Research Center (CIPF, Valencia, Spain) as a research associate through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and was promoted to her current position as the head of the Polymer Therapeutics Laboratory at CIPF in 2006. María is currently responsible for the Screening Platform one of the Specialist Sites in the EU-OPENSCREEN European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) and coordinates the Advanced Therapies Program at the CIPF. She is part of the Strategic Committee of the Valencian Agency of Innovation (AVI) and serves as Director at Large for the CRS since 2021.

María’s research group (http://www.VicentResearchLab.com) focuses on the development of novel nanopharmaceuticals for different therapeutic and diagnostic applications - in particular the application of Polymer Therapeutics in unmet clinical needs. María has been funded by both national and European grants (several acting as coordinator, including an ERC Consolidator grant-MyNano, ERC-PoC-POLYIMMUNE, ERC-PoC-Polybraint and Fund Health La Caixa-NanoPanTher) from academia as well as industry. She is fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows 2019 and Controlled Release Society College of fellows 2021. María has co-authored »135 peer-reviewed papers and 11 patents. Three patents have been licensed to the pharmaceutical industry, one being used for co-founding the spin-off company ‘Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions S.L.’ (Valencia, Spain) in 2012. María was the President of the SPLC-CRS up to 2013, is currently vicepresident of the specialised Chemical Biology Section of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (RSEQ) and the chairperson in key conferences in the nanomedicine field, such as the International Symposium on Polymer Therapeutics and the annual Controlled Release Society meeting in 2019 in Valencia. María is also the executive editor of Adv. Drug Deliv Rev, the associate editor of DDTR, and a member of the editorial boards of key journals in the field.

Dr. Jesús Martínez de la Fuente (Barakaldo (Spain), 1975), holds a CSIC research position (Profesor de Investigación) at INMA. He created his research group (BIONANOSURF Group) at the Univ of Zaragoza in 2007, becoming internationally recognised in nanomaterials and biofunctionalisation. He has extensive experience in the synthesis and characterisation of novel nanomaterials (mainly gold and magnetic nanoparticles) and their biofunctionalization (with carbohydrates, peptides and nucleic acids) for the development of the next generation of nanobiosensors (using plasmonic nanoparticles and thermal transduction) and nanotherapeutics (gene therapy, photothermotherapy, photoacoustics and theranostic). 

Dr. Loretta L. del Mercato is Senior Researcher at Institute of Nanotechnology of Cnr (Cnr-NANOTEC) and coordinator of the «3DCellSensing» group. She received her Master Degree in Biotechnology from the University of Naples “Federico II” in 2004. In 2007, she got her PhD in “Innovative Materials and Technologies” from Institute of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies (ISUFI), University of Salento, working at the National Nanotechnology Laboratory (NNL) under supervision of Prof. R. Rinaldi. From January 2008-April 2010, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Phillips University of Marburg (DE) under supervision of Prof. W.J. Parak. In May 2010, she moved as Junior Researcher to the Nanoscience Institute of CNR (IT). In 2015, she joined the new-funded Nanotechnology Institute of Cnr-NANOTEC, directed by Prof. G. Gigli, as Principal Investigator where she started her own research program. She was awarded an ERC-Stg in 2017 and a MFAG AIRC grant in 2019. At Cnr-NANOTEC, Dr. del Mercato implements a highly interdisciplinary approach, spanning from Materials Science to Chemistry and Bioengineering, to address fundamental challenges in cancer-related research. Through the core expertise in biosensing, stimuli-responsive nanoparticles and biomaterials, her team develops novel approaches for studying cell-cell heterogeneity in 3D in vitro patient-matched tumor models.