일 시 : 2012년 11월 29일, 5:00 PM
장 소 : 500동 목암홀

-Abstract-

Over the past decade, widespread progress in nanotechnology has produced an impressive array of nanodevices with powerful electromagnetic and therapeutic properties. Nonetheless, our capacity to precisely home these materials to regions of disease in vivo has remained very limited and, despite three decades of research, ligand-targeted nanomedicines have yet to provide a benefit to patients. A fundamental limitation of current approaches to nanoparticle targeting is that they lack mechanisms of communication and amplification through which specific targeting events could assist the targeting of materials still in circulation. In this talk, I will discuss the development of nanosystems where a "cocktail" of two distinct nanomaterials work in concert within the bloodstream to amplify tumor targeting and improve therapy in vivo, which was inspired by examples of communication in natural targeting systems (e.g. inflammatory cell recruitment to infection). Specifically, the first activator nanoparticles initially targets tumors and, after arrival, sends signals through the biological cascades or directly to the second responder (diagnostic or therapeutic) nanoparticles to recruit them into tumors efficiently. This approach stands in contradistinction to all current nanotechnologies that utilize formulations of nearly-identical nanoparticles that perform competitive tasks without cooperation in vivo. We believe this work motivates a new paradigm of "systems nanotechnology" for biomedicine, where multi-component, interactive nanoparticle systems are engineered to improve the sensing and treatment of diseases in vivo.