Multidisciplinary Collaborative Research in WIMR on PET/MRI Published in Advanced Materials
A collaborative work at WIMR was published in Advanced Materials, which is the #3 journal in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology with a 2013 Impact Factor of 15.409. In this work, the synthesis and in vivo dual-modality PET/MRI imaging was reported using superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPION) as a nanoplatform. 69Ge is an intriguing PET isotope that cannot be readily labeled with radiochemical methods, which severely hampered its potential use. This challenge was circumvented in this work by incorporating 69Ge onto SPION via a fast and highly specific chelator-free approach. The first author of this paper was Rubel Chakravarty, a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow from India who is visiting the Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology laboratory for 1 year. The 2 other equal-contributing first-authors are Hector F. Valdovinos (a Medical Physics graduate student supervised by Prof. Nickles) and Feng Chen (a postdoctoral fellow in the Cai Group). Detailed info of this work can be found here.
This work represents a synergistic and multidisciplinary collaboration between 3 groups: the Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology Laboratory directed by Prof. Cai, the Cyclotron Group led by Prof. Nickles, and the Applied Neuro MRI Lab Directed by Prof. Meyerand.
In 2013, this same collaborative team published another example of this type of chelator-free synthesis of PET/MRI agents on 72As-labeled SPION in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a top-tier journal in Chemistry with an impact factor of 11.336. The #1 and # 2 journals in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology are Nature Nanotechnology and Nano Today, and Prof. Cai has 2 previous publications in each of the 2 journals.