Prof. Nathalie Mignet

 

Nanomedicine for functional imaging, image-guided surgery and theranostic. Importance of the characterisation of the physico-chemical properties of nano-objects

Nathalie Mignet

Unité des Technologies Chimiques et Biologiques pour la Santé, Equipe Vecteurs pour l’Imagerie et la thérapie ciblées         

INSERM U1022, CNRS UMR8258, Univ. Paris Descartes,  Chimie ParisTech Centre de Recherche Pharmaceutique de PARIS  4,

Avenue de l’Observatoire, 75 270 Paris, Cédex 06.    

Email: nathalie.mignet@parisdescartes.fr

 

Nanoparticles have potentials in imaging in particular as enhanced contrast agent for techniques with low sensitivity, such as MRI or Ultrasound imaging. Thanks to their possible functionalization, various chromophores or contrastophor can be linked to the surface or within the core to provide new properties or to allow obtaining a high number of valuable informations in preclinical studies, while highly reducing the number of animals. Few examples of the interest of functionalized nanomedicine for functional imaging in preclinical evaluation will be shown. First, the conception of a protein scaffold targeting the Asialoglycoprotein receptor (Chaumet-Riffaud et al. 2010.) A radioactive label provide quantitative informations on the liver function while an optical label will provide evidence on the specificity of the targeting. Of main importance for functional imaging is to determine the pharmacokinetic and the stability of the nanomedicine. The aggregation of the nanomedicine will surely disable the functional agent. Characterisation is therefore a main concern of these objects which can also be used for image-guided surgery. A protein fucntionalised with the sialyl Lewis X derivative has been conceived to image tumor margin. Finally, the conception of microbubbles for gene delivery has been proposed, and clearly benefit from ultrasound imaging to fix all parameters and requirement for such interdisciplinary approaches.