UCLA

One of the holy grails in cancer therapy is to simultaneously image and deliver drugs to the tumor site. The first part of the thesis has developed new ideas in cancer theranostics and the second part is about the development of a novel contrast agent for risk-free imaging of the tumor. In the first project of the thesis, I have discussed the development of a liposome-based cargo delivery strategy that can simultaneously monitor alternating magnetic field–induced drug release by observing the change in MRI relaxation parameter R1, and the location and condition of liposomal site (such as tumor) from MRI parameter R2. However, the loading of a contrast agent in liposomes generally results in poor contrast and suffers from various artifacts in in vivo experiments, compared to the use of free contrast agent. Thus, the second project of my work in this part demonstrates the effective filtering of artifacts and contrast enhancement to obtain high quality sensitive imaging of the tumor site in a mouse model using paramagnetic liposomes, a novel pulsing sequence in active-feedback MRI, and robust data analysis. The second part of my work is about using a self-replicating viral-RNA molecule derived from Nodamura, an insect virus, to express and amplify ferritin, leading to increased iron content of the cells in the form of ferrihydrite that acts as a novel contrast agent. In summary, my thesis is about the development of cancer theranostics and a novel contrast agent. In the last part of the thesis, I have reviewed the current development of rapidly growing state of the art magnetic resonance cancer theranostics for commonly used polymer-based nanovehicles.