T Cramb, K L Yaehne, A D Tekrony, A Clancy, Y Gregoriou, J Walker, K Dean, T Nguyen, E Grekova, M Blades, H Wobma, A Doiron, K Rinker, X Y Jiang, S Childs, K Chen and WCW Chan
Accepted Abstracts: J Nanomed Nanotechnol
Nanoparticles are increasingly used in medical applications such as drug delivery, imaging and biodiagnostics, particularly for cancer. The design of nanoparticles for tumor delivery has been largely empirical, owing to a lack of quantitative data on angiogenic tissue sequestration. Using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, the deposition rate constants of nanoparticles into angiogenic blood vessel tissue were determined. It was shown that deposition is dependent on surface charge. Moreover, the size dependency strongly suggests that nanoparticles are taken up by a passive mechanism that depends largely on geometry. These findings imply that it is possible to tune nanoparticle pharmacokinetics simply by adjusting nanoparticle size. Furthermore, the properties of nanoparticles that can be exploited to induce fusion with cell membranes were exploited. Finally, a novel technique, multicolour fluorescence cross correlation spectroscopy that has been developed to measure hybrid nanoassembly in situ will be examined.
D T Cramb is a Professor, Head of Department of Chemistry, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Director of the Nanoscience Program, University of Calgary. He studies the behavior of nanoparticles in embryonic organisms. His group has developed sophisticated fluorescence spectroscopy technology that is unique in the world. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Chemical Society and was awarded the Thermo-Fisher Prize in Spectroscopy (2010). He has published over 60 manuscripts and holds grants from NSERC, CIHR and the Alberta government. He has given over 70 invited talks on Nanoscience in the past 5 years.