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The innovation of multifunctional efficient, and safer treatments is a major challenge in nanomedicine. For example, the combination of magneto-mechanical and the photothermal strategies into one single therapeutic stage is one of the promising developments in cancer treatment. Without specificity, however, these therapies would target and harm both cancer and healthy cells. Therefore, the goal of precision medicine is to focus on delivering therapies to specific cells and minimize the side effects on healthy. Therefore, in this study, biocompatible, magnetic iron nanowires were functionalized with antibodies directed against CD44, a cell surface marker that is overexpressed in a large number of cancer cells. To test the functionality of the antibodies following conjugation to the iron nanowires, immunostaining and immunoprecipitation were performed and confirmed that the antigenicity of the antibodies was preserved following their conjugation to the nanowires. Indeed, the antibody coated nanowires were shown to play a major role in enhancing the accumulation and the internalization of nanowires to the cell surface in both adherent cells (e.g. colon cancer cells) and suspension cells (e.g., leukemia cells). Moreover, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry was used to quantify the attached and internalized nanowires. After only 1 h, the presence of antibodies enhanced the ability of the NWs to specifically target cancer cells, by more than 60% in both colon and leukemic cancers, compared to their negative controls. In addition, the presence of antibodies did not affect the magnetization of the nanowires. Therefore, the combination of both magneto-mechanical and photothermal strategies in the presence of the antibodies functionalized nanowires was applied to two types of cancer cells, colon cancer and leukemia. Strikingly, the targeted nanowires resulted in more than 76±3.5% and 45.5±0.4% cell death of colon cancer and leukemic target cells and less than 40% of cells died from the non-targeted NWs. These results represent a significant finding, as this is the first study which examines the role antibodies play in the internalization of iron nanowires, and more importantly, the efficacy to kill cancer cells. It also confirmed the possibility of targeting cancer cells with functionalized nanowires and destroying these cells utilizing combined strategies.

Strain-mediated magnetoelastic composite materials are being considered for communication in lossy environments. Their consideration is attributable to predictions stating order of magnitude improvements over current antenna technology. The magnetic antenna design considered herein consists of three layers: 1) a piezoelectric layer, 2) a linear elastic layer, and 3) a magnetoelastic layer. The antenna operates by mediating strain through the device in a resonant bending mode. The magnetoelastic layer is stressed which results in a changing magnetization ultimately leading to a changing magnetostatic field in free space which acts as a signal for information transfer. In order to prove the efficacy of this approach finite element models have been developed to aid in the design and optimization process. Where these models fall short is in their overall run-time to fully resolve the coupled dynamics. It is for this reason that the work presented in this thesis focuses on the development of a figure of merit capable of predicting optimal bias conditions and geometries needing only the data from a static bias study from FEA. The material level magnetomechanical coupling factor is chosen as the foundation for the figure of merit. The figure of merit is then augmented to include structure level information regarding the demagnetizing field and the non-uniform stress distribution. The main results presented are the effects of including demagnetization and stress distributions, and most importantly the ability of the metric to predict the change in magnetization of the device. It is shown that for aspect ratios greater than roughly 2.5 the metric trends the same as the change in magnetization predicted by finite element simulations. The region of disagreement between the metric and the fully resolved finite element simulation is explained by tying back to underlying assumptions made during the formulation of the magnetometric demagnetization factor used in the analysis. The case is made for the figure of merit to be included in the analysis of strain-mediated antennas for its ability to find optimum designs while reducing the overall simulation run-time by an order of magnitude. / Master of Science / Many communication devices are readily available however there are a few key gaps in communication technology that are yet to be filled. Notably, communication in lossy environments using small scale, low frequency, devices has proven difficult due to the fundamental limits of antennas (a cell phone cannot communicate into a mine shaft for search and rescue operations, nor can they communicate underwater to submarines or divers for instance). A promising new approach of communication using smart magnetic materials is under consideration in this thesis. Specifically, the goal herein is to develop an analysis tool capable of predicting device performance without having to run computationally expensive/time consuming finite element simulations. In this thesis it is shown that the analysis tool is capable of predicting device performance while reducing the necessary simulation run-time by an order of magnitude. Using this tool, researches will be able to design better prototypes; moving one step closer to portable communication in lossy environments.

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