Nanotech News

As part of its ongoing efforts to accelerate the use of nanotechnology in cancer, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) today awarded $7.1 million to establish a collaborative, multidisciplinary partnership of academic and private sector research that will develop a new class of nanoparticles for molecular and cellular imaging. The goal of this Bioengineering Research Partnership is to develop biomedical nanotechnology, biomolecular engineering, and bioinformatics tools for identifying molecular signatures, or biomarkers, of cancer and to use those to better understand cancer behavior and its relationship to clinical outcome. The proposed research is broadly applicable to many types of malignant tumors, including breast cancer, colorectal carcinoma, and lymphoma, but a particular focus will be placed on the biological behavior of human prostate cancer.

"This new award will enable a powerful, nanotechnology focused collaboration involving academia, private industry and one of our cancer centers," said Andrew von Eschenbach, Director of the National Cancer Institute." It is this type of alliance that will allow us to leverage the strengths of each sector to speed the development and application of nanotechnology based tools to more accurately diagnose, treat and prevent cancer."

The partnership’s lead investigator, Shuming Nie, Ph.D., director of cancer nanotechnology at Emory University, is a long-time NCI grantee. He and his colleagues at Emory and the Georgia Institute of Technology have pioneered the development of quantum dots, nanometer-size semiconductor particles that can be used to “tag” virtually any biological molecule and study its behavior in living cells and organisms. In this new initiative, Dr. Nie will partner with investigators from seven academic and clinical laboratories representing broad expertise in bioengineering, bioinformatics, tumor biology, bioanalytical chemistry, systems biology, oncology, pathology, and urology. In addition, private sector partner Cambridge Research and Instrumentation (CRI), based in Woburn, MA, will contribute expertise in high-performance in vivo imaging.

An August 2004 paper in the journal Nature Biotechnology, "In vivo cancer targeting and imaging with semiconductor quantum dots," (Nature Biotechnology, 22(8), 969-976 (2004)), shows the promise of the quantum dot technology that lies at the heart of this partnership. The authors of this paper, who are all participants in the new partnership, demonstrated for the first time that bioconjugated quantum dots can be used to simultaneously target and image prostate tumors in living mice. Bioconjugated dots are chemically linked to molecules such as antibodies, peptides, proteins or DNA and engineered to detect other molecules, such as those present on the surface of cancer cells.

The Bioengineering Research Partnership includes faculty from the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory; Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute; and the Departments of Urology, Radiation Oncology, and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in Emory University School of Medicine. Also included are scientists at the Cambridge Research and Instrumentation Inc. (CRI) in Woburn, Massachusetts. In addition to Dr. Nie, collaborators include investigators Leland Chung, Fray Marshall, John Petros, Peter Johnstone, Mahul Amin, Gang Bao, May Wang, Haiyen Zhau, and Richard Levenson, (CRI).

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For additional information regarding this program visit:

• Emory University
• Georgia Institute of Technology