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This publication is part of the proceedings of the Biot-Bažant Conference on Engineering Mechanics and Physics of Porous Materials, which took place virtually on June 1-3, 2021. It contains a one-page abstract and the video of the talk that was given at the conference.

The interaction of Non-Newtonian fluid and porous media is a topic of great scientific interest and it finds application in a wide number of industrial fields: from the enhanced oil recovery to the drug delivery. In particular, a very interesting category of liquids are the so-called property called "yield stress fluids". These systems have the ability to behave as solids under this stress threshold and to flow as liquid above it. Numerous studies have been performed in this sense even if the mechanism on a microscale level still have not been completely elucidated. In this work, we identified some model systems such as polyacrylic acid (Carbopol)-water solutions and by the use of confocal microscopy we looked at the microstructure of the gel to understand the origin of the yield stress and how the confinement and the flow have an impact on this microstructure. It has been observed that the swollen particles of Carbopol build a 3D network whose connectivity causes the yield stress. Furthermore, the system can be described as two phases at equilibrium since the particle concentration does not influence the properties of the solvent phase. Changing the temperature, a phase diagram has been drafted finding analogies with typical polymeric systems, finding a miscibility gap. These learnings helped developing a novel experimental tool based on a torsion pendulum equipped with a magnetic dipole and a rotating cylinder immersed in the material, to measure yield stress in gels able to discriminate dynamic and static yield stress. At the end, an alternative system as detergent foams, has been studied focusing on the process of formation in sponges, in order to understand the effect of surfactant and sponge material on the foamability of the system. Our experimental data revealed that using a lower confinement in the foam formation allows the production of a drier foams (i.e. with lower liquid fraction, φL

Lipid-conjugated Ru(III) complexes - designed to obtain lipophilic analogues of the low molecular weight derivative AziRu, which is a NAMI-A-like anticancer agent - have been synthesized and fully characterized. A detailed biophysical investigation, including multiple, integrated techniques, allowed determining their molecular and self-assembling properties in aqueous solutions mimicking the extracellular environment, showing that our design produced a protective effect from hydrolysis of the Ru(III) complexes. In vitro biological experiments, carried out in comparison with AziRu, demonstrated that, among the novel lipophilic Ru(III) complexes synthesized, the compounds derivatized with palmitic and stearic acid, that we named PalmiPyRu and StePyRu respectively, showed attractive features and a promising antiproliferative activity, selective on specific breast cancer phenotypes. To get a deeper insight into their interactions with potential biomacromolecular targets, their ability to bind both bovine serum albumin (BSA), an abundant serum carrier protein, and some DNA model systems, including duplex and G-quadruplex structures, has been investigated by spectroscopic techniques. Inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis of the ruthenium amount incorporated in human MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells, after incubation in parallel experiments with PalmiPyRu and AziRu, showed a markedly higher cell uptake of the lipophilic Ru(III) complex with respect to AziRu. These data confirmed that the proper lipidic tail decorating the metal complex not only favoured the formation of aggregates in the extracellular media but also improved their cell membrane penetration, thus leading to higher antiproliferative activity selective on breast cancer cells.