Abstract
Precise diagnosis and monitoring of cancer depend on the development of advanced technologies for in vivo imaging. Owing to the merits of outstanding spatial resolution and excellent soft-tissue contrast, the application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in biomedicine is of great importance. Herein, Angiopep-2 (ANG), which can simultaneously help to cross the blood-brain barrier and target the glioblastoma cells, was rationally combined with the 3.3 nm-sized ultra-small iron oxide (Fe3O4) to construct high-performance MRI nanoprobes (Fe3O4-ANG NPs) for glioblastoma diagnosis. The in vitro experiments show that the resultant Fe3O4-ANG NPs not only exhibit favorable relaxation properties and colloidal stability, but also have low toxicity and high specificity to glioblastoma cells, which provide critical prerequisites for the in vivo tumor imaging. Furthermore, in vivo imaging results show that the Fe3O4-ANG NPs exhibit good targeting ability toward subcutaneous and orthotopic glioblastoma model, manifesting an obvious contrast enhancement effect on the T1-weighted MR image, which demonstrates promising potential in clinical application.
Highlights
IntroductionMagnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been demonstrated as a powerful technique for the visualization of the anatomical structure with high spatial resolution [1,2,3]
Image of the as-synthesized nanoparticles and their corresponding particle size distribution are shown in Figure 1a,b, respectively, confirming that the nanoparticles exhibit a spherical shape with an average particle size of 3.3 ± 0.5 nm
Fe3 O4 NPs water-solubility and functionalization ability, the oleate ligands on the particle surface were replaced by DP-PEG2000 -Mal using a common ligand exchange strategy, obtaining the Fe3 O4 -Mal NPs (Figure S1)
Summary
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been demonstrated as a powerful technique for the visualization of the anatomical structure with high spatial resolution [1,2,3]. Compared with computed tomography (CT) [4], positron emission tomography (PET), and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) [5], MRI offers several advantages including excellent soft-tissue contrast, the absence of potentially destructive ionizing radiation, and multi-functional imaging with diverse applications [6,7,8]. During MRI scanning, proton nuclei would return to the equilibrium state after removing the resonant radio frequency pulses. This process results in two types of relaxation processes, namely longitudinal relaxation and transverse relaxation, which is defined as
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