When thinking on nanotechnologies for remote temperature control within cells or living organism, everyone just thinks on heating up (e.g. hyperthermia, plasmonic heating, microwave heating). To remotely transfer power to be released within the cell is the obvious method to modify its temperature. In a diametrically opposite direction, NanoCool will explore the possibility of local thermal control within cells by heat absorption, by cooling them down.

NanoCool will explore the potential of locally cooling neuronal cells in a non-invasive manner using a magnetic order transition within nanoparticles (NPs) to absorb heat. While magnetic NPs are already used in hyperthermia treatment of cancer cells, there are not reports on the use any remote technology, including or not NPs or magnetic radiation for therapeutic hypothermia. Upon sucess of NanoCool, specific limitations of current cooling methods such as invasiveness, temperature oscillations, speed of cooling, etc will be overcomed. The magneto caloric effect in gadolinium-based materials, which can take place at room temperature, will be used to explore remote cooling down of cells that have been incubated with Gd-based NPs. To explore this radically new therapeutic hypothermia strategy, we will produce Gd-Au core shell NPs functionalized with quantum dots (to be used as local nanothermometers). The luminescence of quantum dots will be the read out to measure local temperature variations within the cell. The cooling performance of these NPs will be explored in vitro using neuronal cells by applying magnetic fields at different amplitudes. In general all disorders associated to ischemic processes will directly profit from this technology. Nevertheless, success of NanoCool certainly opens other applications in the fields of virology, infectious diseases, metastasis, etc.