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Kuan Boone Tan

Relaxivity of the magnetoliposomes

The objective of this STSM was to measure the relaxivity of the magnetoliposomes (ML) developed for thermo-chemotherapy (TC) for metastatic breast cancer. Relaxivity is a measure of the sensitivity of a MRI contrast agent. The measurement of the relaxivity of the MLs is crucial to the project since the ML could provide individualized monitoring of tissue drug concentration distribution during or after treatment. The sensitivity of a T2 MRI contrast agent is generally expressed by the transverse relaxivity r2. The results indicated that r2 relaxivity of SPIOs increases with increasing size of the nanoparticles. Similarly, MLs that encapsulated larger SPIOs also had higher r2 relaxivity. To verify the effectiveness of the ML as negative T2 contrast agents, we obtained T2-weighted images of the control phantom and phantoms with MLs encapsulating SPIOs of different sizes. The MR contrast properties of the MLs were evaluated using 1% agarose phantoms.  The signal intensity of phantoms with MLs were significantly diminished on the T2-weighted MR scans compared to the control phantom. These results show that these MLs are high-performance MRI contrast agents that enable highly sensitive T2-weighted MRI measurements. 

Poster/Oral presentation(s) /Conference abstract(s) originating from this mission