Imaging & Therapy
The synergy between Imaging and Therapy gave the birth to the
neologism "Theranosis" that represents a new research
area where imaging is not merely used for diagnostic purposes,
but it offers to pharmacologists and physicians a robust tool for
assessing the therapeutic outcome. Typical applications of
Theranosis include the in vivo assessment of drug biodistribution
and accumulation at the target site, visualization of the drug
release from a given nanocarrier, and real-time monitoring of the
therapeutic effect.
Most of the theranostic procedures
requires the use of specific imaging probes, named theranostic
agents. The expected end-point of theranostic agents is to
provide a fundamental support for the optimization of innovative
diagnostic and therapeutic strategies that could significantly
contribute to achieve important advances in the field of the
"personalized medicine".
Theranosis is intimately
linked with nanomedicine, because nanocarriers, besides improving
the therapeutic index of a drug and reducing side effects, can be
easily loaded with imaging probes. First, the imaging-detectable
nanocarrier can be administered without the drug to evaluate its
ability to reach the biological target. Then, the theranostic
nanomedicine can be injected and imaging can monitor the
effective delivery of the drug as well as its release from the
nanocarrier.
Another important application area of Theranosis
is the support that imaging provides to cellular and regenerative
therapies. Here, in general, therapeutic cells are labelled with
imaging probes that make possible to localize with accuracy the
transplantation site of the cells or to track the destiny of
cells after their injection.
However, imaging can support not
only pharmacological or cellular therapies, but can have a strong
and beneficial impact on surgery. Most of the clinical
interventional procedures are guided by human vision and
perception. However, human eyes are not sensitive or accurate
enough in detecting the cellular or molecular signature of a
given disease. For this reason, advanced optical and
opto-acoustic methods have been considering to complement human
vision for making clinical decision during interventions.
In our Center, several theranostic procedure have been developed
and preclinically validated aimed at:
- monitoring by MRI the biodistribution of a drug transported by a given nanocarrier (liposomes, PLGA micelles, apoferritin)
- assessing by MRI the release of a drug (e.g. doxorubicin) from a nanocarrier (liposomes) triggered by a local application of low intensity ultrasound
- providing a fluorescent guide to discriminate tumor and healthy tissue in prostatectomy
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