O2SENSE - Oxygen Sensing with Multimodality Imaging Probes

This programme will employ physical sciences and biomedicine techniques to develop a revolutionary approach to early cancer diagnosis and post-treatment monitoring aiming to address shortcomings in our current technology in oxygen sensing and imaging of hypoxic prostate tumours.

This proposal represents a gearing process towards the biomedical implementation of metal complexes and functionalised nanoparticles as novel synthetic platform systems for personalised diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer and which can also be extended to neurodegenerative disorders. The work programme is a meeting point for interdisciplinary science that goes well beyond state of the art. New chemical sensing devices will outstrip and supersede existing biopsy and imaging techniques used in diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancers.

The key advances of this programme will be:

(a) ‘smart’ all-in-one multimodal imaging probes, whose sensitivities to levels of oxygen in cells (pO2) will be tunable to respond to various levels of hypoxia in tumors as desired. Our ultra-sensitive probes will be effective at low O2 concentrations and respond to reduced levels of hypoxia and under anoxia. This will surpass the mainstay in cancer diagnosis and therapy and provide increased selectivity for a wider range of tumours.

(b) new probes suitable for interlocked Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Single Photon Emission Tomography (SPECT), and optical imaging methodologies Simultaneous in vitro and in vivo diagnostic information from radioimaging techniques (PET, SPECT) and optical imaging will provide in depth understanding of biological processes and lead to personalised medicine.

(c) new imaging tools for the first time will monitor the cellular biolocalisation of these probes by multiphoton optical imaging in nearIR regimes. These will drive the development of time-gated microscopy and multi-photon imaging with sensitivity for various levels of tumour hypoxia.