As many as 40 million surgeries are performed annually in the United States for both acute and chronic interventions, with a large portion performed without any image guidance, forcing surgeons to rely solely on direct visualization and palpation. In the context of tumor resection, this results in poor margins that lead to high rates of recurrence, and is confounded by iatrogenic nerve injury as a result of poor visualization and tissue penetration from white light alone. Fluorescence guided surgery (FGS) has shown significant promise in combatting these shortcomings of typical surgery through the use of a wide range of fluorescent markers, from antibodies to small molecules. Compared to bio-affinity agents and nanomaterials, small molecules are more desired for in vivo fluorescence imaging, owing to their low toxicity, low production cost, quick tissue uptake, and rapid clearance. Previous work has identified the oxazine scaffold as a promising avenue for nerve-specific contrast agent development, due to its sufficiently low molecular weight to cross the blood-nerve-barrier (BNB), tunable photophysical properties, and high nerve specificity, all of which underly the importance of elucidating structure-function relationships through functional modification. The two main strategies behind the optimization of small molecules for nerve-sparing FGS involve modifications to increase nerve specific uptake, as compared with muscle and adipose tissue, as well as photophysical tuning for near-infrared (NIR) absorption and emission profiles, signal intensity, and penetration depth, among others. The clinical utility of these novel small molecule fluorophores will be demonstrated through mutlti-color FGS, enabling simultaneous visualization of critical nerve and tumor tissues.

Fine-tuned small molecule fluorophores for fluorescence-guided surgery

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.