Design of magnetic and fluorescent nanoparticles for in vivo MR and NIRF cancer imaging

One big challenge for cancer treatment is that it has many errors in detection of cancers in the early stages before metastasis occurs. Using a current imaging modality, the detection of small tumors having potential metastasis is still very difficult. Thus, the development of multi-component nanoparticles (NPs) for dual modality cancer imaging is invaluable. The multi-component NPs can be an alternative to overcome the limitations from an imaging modality. For example, the multi-component NPs can visualize small tumors in both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and near infrared fluorescence (NIRF) imaging, which can help find the location of the tumors deep inside the body using MRI and subsequently guide surgeons to delineate the margin of tumors using highly sensitive NIRF imaging during a surgical operation. In this dissertation, we demonstrated the potential of the MRI and NIRF dual-modality NPs for skin and bladder cancer imaging. The multi-component NPs consisted of glycol chitosan, superparamagnetic iron oxide, NIRF dye, and cancer targeting peptides. We characterized the NPs and evaluated them with tumor bearing mice as well as various cancer cells. The findings of this research will contribute to the development of cancer diagnostic imaging and it can also be extensively applied to drug delivery system and fluorescence-guided surgical removal of cancer