Medicine Innovates Feature: Development of New Stable Biophotonic Imaging Agents
The onset of nanotechnology has been of great benefit to the medical field. Lipid nanoparticles have been used as delivery carriers for drugs and imaging agents owing to their excellent biological properties. Phospholipids are the key building blocks for the success of liposomes in drug delivery applications. Unfortunately, the transformation of liposomes from singular drug delivery vehicles into multimodal nanoplatforms has focused on the "all-in-one" approach which poses a great challenge in the clinical translation. To address those hurdles in clinical translation Dr. Zheng's lab focuses on the "one-for-all" approach, in which a single nanoparticle building block exhibits multifunctionality upon self-assembly into nanoparticles. As such, aza-boron dipyrromethenes (aza-BODIPYs), a class of near-infrared fluorophores that have attracted significant interest in cancer imaging, were being investigated by the group.
Medicine Innovates Feature : For Reovirus, One Amino Acid Can Change Everything!
Studies have shown that for several viruses, multiple viral genes are involved in the regulation of the innate immune response that is mediated by the interferon response. This response is a major determinant of the pathogenicity of viruses; it also contributes to the ability of certain viruses to distinguish between cancer cells and parental cells. Some researchers have stated that an in-depth understanding of this determinant is quintessential to the conduction of epidemiological surveillance as well as the successful optimization and selection of appropriate viral strains for the treatment of different types of cancer.