Instituto de Investigacións Tecnolóxicas and Applied Physics Department, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
The aim of the talk is to highlight some key aspects that, in my opinion and from the theoretical point of view, need to be addressed in order to achieve further biomedical success using the heat released by nanomagnets under AC fields: despite the promising application perspectives (hyperthermia cancer treatment; drug release; magnetogenetics; etc.), the fact is that the success in reaching routine clinical practice is very scarce. From the physics point of view, a main difficulty is the lack of theoretical models able to describe the behaviour of MNPs in the viscous biological environment, what results in the absence of accurate tools able to guide the experiments. The failure in the current models involves several key factors, including procedural (complete impossibility to explain successful heating effects on cells when the global heating is negligible); interpretative (current heating mechanisms cannot account for accurate heat-triggering experiments – other mechanisms at play?); and descriptive ones (available models are limited to short timescales, far from those of the experiments). The complex nature of the problem requires a multiphysics approach to go beyond the state-of-of-the art and overcome the above limitations, able to; simultaneously embrace superparamagnetic and Brownian processes; provide alternatives to current heat generation mechanisms; and efficiently deal with the different timescales involved. During the talk I will try to summarize the limitations and a possible approach to overcome them, with the objective of developing of a general framework for the comprehension of the heating performance of magnetic nanoparticles under AC magnetic fields in viscous media.