In the past two decades, plasmonic nanostructures have gained tremendous interest as both diagnostic and therapeutic agents for cancer detection and treatment. In this talk I will show the utility of gold nanostar probes designed in my lab for rapid and noninvasive detection of multiple immunomarkers of cancer to enable patient selection for immunotherapies, as well as response to treatment after immunotherapy. We combined a clinical and pre-clinical imaging technique, positron emission tomography with surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (ImmunoPET-SERS) in vivo by labeling gold nanostars with radiolabels, Raman reporter molecules, and targeting antibodies. Multimodal ImmunoPET-SERS seamlessly integrates depth-resolved whole-body imaging and high sensitivity of PET with high spatiotemporal resolution and multiplexing of SERS providing dynamic immunomarker profiling in vivo. Further, ImmunoPET-SERS was used to determine the immunomarker status of mice treated with combinatorial immunotherapy; we demonstrated real-time feedback of CD8+ infiltration in tumors which was confirmed with IHC ex vivo. High resolution SERS maps of tumor sections provide quantitative measure of multiple receptor expression in the same tumor section which correlate well with histological analysis of tissue.

Cancer diagnosis and response to treatment with plasmonic nanoprobes

2019 Spring National Meeting

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