Pacific Rim Symposium on Surfaces, Coatings and Interfaces (PacSurf 2016)
    Biomaterial Surfaces & Interfaces Tuesday Sessions
       Session BI-TuE

Invited Paper BI-TuE7
Activatable Molecular Nanoprobes for the Perception of Cancer Activity

Tuesday, December 13, 2016, 7:40 pm, Room Milo

Session: Medical Applications
Presenter: Seungjoo Haam, Yonsei University, Korea, Republic of Korea
Correspondent: Click to Email
Stimuli responsive, i.e. activatable, nanomaterials are capable of providing their conformational or phase changes corresponding to specific environmental stimuli variations in biological systems including temperature, pH and reactive oxygen species (ROS). Further, specific biomolecules such as DNA, RNA and enzymes can represent the biological status, particularly for cancer activity allowing better understanding physiological and pathological processes. These stimuli variations would be small but they can trigger drastic changes in the structures of materials because they interact facilely with sub-nanometre-sized drugs or other nanometres-sized biomolecules. In particular, matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are highly attractive targets for molecular imaging because degrading and modifying the extracellular matrix by enzymatic activity is required for the invasive process of cancer cells. On the other hand, microRNAs (miRNAs), small, non-coding RNA molecules, play an important role as negative gene regulators and have been found to control various biological functions, such as cellular proliferation, differentiation, metastasis, and apoptosis. Emerging evidence suggests that miRNAs can also function as a diagnostic biomarker and a therapeutic target for a wide range of diseases, including human cancers, because miRNAs themselves can act as tumour suppressor genes or oncogenes. In this presentation, we describe the case examples of the development of activatable nanoprobes enabling precise recognition of the expression of specific enzyme (MT1-MMP) and miRNA34a which could provide deep perception of cancer activity, metastasis and invasion.