Professor Drain Leads Team in Developing New Strategy for Medical Imaging

A team led by Hunter College professor Charles Michael Drain and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center professors Jan Grim and Moritz Kircher reported a novel way to radiolabel silica nanoparticles without using organic ligands in a strategy that can transform biomedical imaging and diagnostics. The silica nanoparticles were demonstrated to efficiently and tightly bind six medically relevant isotopes. The radiolabeled silica nanoparticles were shown to have excellent stability in mice and highly efficacious in lymph node imaging. This is a novel molecular imaging method base on nanotechnology. The experiments were done by Hunter College and Graduate Center doctoral students Matthew Wall and Travis Shaffer, who were supported by the National Science Foundation IGERT program. The findings were published in the American Chemical Society, Nano Letters, http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nl503522y .