Development of superparamagnetic nanoparticles as an efficient contrast agent for multimodal imaging

The Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, which is part of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) just published a high impact scientific paper about the use of Yttrium-86 as a PET surrogate marker for Gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCA). Mariane Le Fur et al. demonstrate that the Yttrium-86 (Y-86) isotope can be used as a Gadolinium (Gd) surrogate, showing that Gd and their analogous Y complexes have similar properties both in solution and in vivo. Furthermore, Yttrium-86 PET can be used to track the biodistribution of GBCAs over a two-day period and thus give insights in the accumulation of Gd in vivo to further evaluate possible toxicological tissue accumulations.
This important result published in Angewandte Chemie comes within less than a year since the install of the Bruker PET-Insert at Peter Caravan’s lab at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, which is part of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It is operated in combination with a Bruker´s 4.7 T BioSpec MRI in simultaneous operation.

Do you want to learn more? Read the whole article!