Prof. Cai Awarded the 2012 European Association of Nuclear Medicine Eckert & Ziegler Abstract Award
Prof. Weibo Cai, principal investigator of the Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology
Laboratory won the 2012 European Association of Nuclear
Medicine (EANM) Eckert & Ziegler Abstract Award. This is the 1st year that the
Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology laboratory submitted abstracts to the EANM
Annual Congress. Both of the abstracts were selected as oral presentations.
The abstract was entitled "In Vivo Targeting and Imaging of Tumor Vasculature
with Radiolabeled, Antibody-Conjugated Nano-Graphene". For the first time, it was
demonstrated that nano-graphene oxide can be specifically directed to the tumor in
vivo. The versatile chemistry of graphene-based nanomaterials makes them suitable
nanoplatforms for future biomedical research, such as cancer theranostics.
The work was highlighted in Chemical & Engineering News in February 2012. Immediately
after the work came out online, scientific publisher Springer invited Prof.
Cai to edit a book on a related topic. The book, entitled "Engineering in Translational
Medicine", is scheduled for late 2013 or early 2014. In March, the Editor of Nanoscale
invited Prof. Cai to write a Feature Review Article on this topic, which appeared in the
July issue.
This work on nano-graphene was in collaboration with Prof. Zhuang Liu at
Soochow University, a long term
collaborator of Prof. Cai. In 2007, together they reported the first in vivo tumor
targeting and imaging of single-walled carbon nanotubes in Nature Nanotechnology.