OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Cong Li from the Key Laboratory of Smart Drug Delivery, Ministry of Education, School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Shanghai 201203, China
Acidification of extracellular pH (pHe) is a universal characteristic of solid tumor regardless of their genotypes or phenotypes. The acidic pHe plays important role in tumor invasion, migration and metastasis by driving protease-mediated digestion, disrupting cell-matrix interaction and up-regulating the metastatic potential of cancer cells. Currently most fluorescence probes detected the neoplasia by targeting the tumor-associated receptors over-expressed on the cancer cell membrane.
However, the expression level of these receptors is hard to predict, which compromises imaging sensitivity and accuracy. Furthermore, the signal of the receptor-targeting probes always stays at a high level, which leads to a strong background signal in normal tissue due to non-specific binding. In this work, a novel biodegradable nanoprobe that showed pH-activated near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence was developed. This probe visualized both subcutaneous and orthotopic human glioblastoma U87MG xenografts with sensitivity and target to background ratio in vivo. Overall, the work provides a prototype to visualize the solid tumor in vivo with high sensitivity and minimal systemic toxicity by sensing the tumor acidic microenvironment.
