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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Atlanta, GA | Posted: October 1, 2015
Summary Sentence:
The Laboratory for Synthetic Immunity, led by Dr. Gabe Kwong of the Coutler Department of Biomedical Engineering at GT and Emory, have published new research into cancer diagnostics using nanoparticle design.
Full Summary:
No summary paragraph submitted.
Kwong Cancer BioMarkerThe Laboratory for Synthetic Immunity, led by Dr. Gabe Kwong of the Coutler Department of Biomedical Engineering at GT and Emory, have published new research into cancer diagnostics using nanoparticle design.
Using targeted nanoparticle design and predictive mathematical modeling to increase biomarker diagnostic sensitivity, the team hope to increase early tumor detection rates.
Abstract: Advances in nanomedicine are providing sophisticated functions to precisely control the behavior of nanoscale drugs and diagnostics. Strategies that coopt protease activity as molecular triggers are increasingly important in nanoparticle design, yet the pharmacokinetics of these systems are challenging to understand without a quantitative framework to reveal nonintuitive associations. We describe a multicompartment mathematical model to predict strategies for ultrasensitive detection of cancer using synthetic biomarkers, a class of activity-based probes that amplify cancerderived signals into urine as a noninvasive diagnostic. Using a model formulation made of a PEG core conjugated with protease-cleavable peptides, we explore a vast design space and identify guidelines for increasing sensitivity that depend on critical parameters such as enzyme kinetics, dosage, and probe stability. According to this model, synthetic biomarkers that circulate in stealth but then activate at sites of disease have the theoretical capacity to discriminate tumors as small as 5 mm in diameter—a threshold sensitivity that is otherwise challenging for medical imaging and blood biomarkers to achieve. This model may be adapted to describe the behavior of additional activity-based approaches to allow cross-platform comparisons, and to predict allometric scaling across species.
Congratulations to Dr. Kwong and the LSI team!
