Collaborative Research on Molecular Imaging Published in PNAS
The latest work from the Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology Laboratory (http://mi.wisc.edu/) has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/24/1509667112.abstract). This work is a collaboration between the UW-Madison Cyclotron Group, TRACON Pharmaceuticals, and the Cai Research Group. Haiming Luo (Research Associate) and Reinier Hernandez (5th-year Medical Physics graduate student) are equal-contributing first authors of the manuscript. This manuscript was a Direct Submission to PNAS.
Given the success of combination therapies for the treatment of cancer, the use of bispecific antibodies targeting multiple cancerous molecular pathways is an attractive strategy to enhance the efficacy of current therapeutic paradigms. In this work, the generation of a bispecific construct was described for non-invasive PET imaging of glioblastoma via bioorthogonal click chemistry. The excellent tumor-homing properties displayed by the bispecific probe, which features two antibody fragments simultaneously targeting epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and CD105, demonstrated that this is a simple and effective method to generate multi-specific targeting agents for non-invasive molecular imaging.