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Just like any other field of human knowledge application, also Medicine is going Nano. The keywords announcing the dawn of a new era in the general area of healthcare are personalized therapies, point of care, Nano vectors, microneedles, theranostics. These innovative instruments will fight against old and new plagues, such as silent cancers, cardio-pathologies, degenerative diseases, resistant infections. The new weapons available to medical doctors are the result of highly interdisciplinary collaborations between biologist, chemists, physicists and engineers, stating the supremacy of cross fertilization of culture over isolated box of expertise.

Mainly designed and realized as a painless alternative to the hypodermic syringe, microneedle‐based devices are currently approaching commercial market placement. The considerable academic and industrial investment in this technology is reflected by a multitude of papers published and patents registered every year, which is also a sign of a field in full fermentation. New materials and innovative methodologies are continuously exploited in search of the best performance at the lowest cost. For these reasons, an updated review, focused predominantly on the last year of scientific production, is a useful guideline in this rapidly changing panorama. This report provides a critical review of microneedle technologies presented in the very recent literature with a particular focus on those closest to the needs of the healthcare field. Although a few devices are already commercial, further effort is still needed to achieve complete clinical translation and therapeutic efficacy competitive with or superior to those of the devices used as standards and adopted by national health systems.

Blends obtained by mixing high temperature applications thermoplastics have been investigated. Namely the blends considered in this work are made by semi-crystalline thermoplastics PEEK with amorphous PEI. The final goal is to analyse the mechanical, chemical-physical and environmental resistance characteristics of these blends to evaluate their suitability as matrices of carbon reinforced composites for aeronautical structural applications. The first collected results are very promising.

The use of plastic film substrates for organic electronic devices promises to enable new applications, such as flexible displays. Plastic substrates have several distinct advantages, such as ruggedness, robustness, ultra lightness, conformability and impact resistance over glass substrates, which are primarily used in flat panel displays (FPDs) today. However, high transparency, proper surface roughness, low gas permeability and high transparent electrode conductivity of the plastic substrate are required for commercial applications. Polyesters, both amorphous and semicrystalline, are a promising class of commercial polymer for optoelectronic applications. Surface modification of polyester films was performed via chemical solution determining hydrolysis or oxidation. Hydrolysis was carried out by means of sodium hydroxide solution and oxidation by using standard clean 1 (SC-1) of RCA procedure [1]. For this work we have used commercial polymer films of 100µm in thickness: AryLite™ [2], supplied by Ferrania Imaging Technologies S.p.A. and characterised by very high glass transition temperature, Mylar™ (Polyethylene Terephthalate PET) and Teonex™ (Polyethylene Naphthalate PEN) both supplied by Dupont. More over, a bioriented and semicrystalline PET have been used. The aim of this study is modifying the polymer surface to improve the adhesion between organic-inorganic layer. It was found that the NaOH and SC-1 treatment cause a decrease of contact angles. In the present study we have deposited a thin films of amorphous hydrogenated silicon (a-Si:H) and its oxide (SiO2) on a new high temperature polymer substrate, AryLite™, by plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) [3], with a radio frequency plasma system.