Proceedings of September Meeting 2016 (NFM16)
Publication date: 14th June 2016
The key idea for using nanocrystals for biomedical diagnostics is to benefit from their outstanding physical properties in the visualization of biological events or malignant cells or tissues. This requires a special design of the ligand shell, which preserves the fluorescent, magnetic and plasmonic properties of the particles in the biological environment on one side and allows a specific targeting on the other. The lecture reports on different chemical approaches and describes factors determining the biological response on fully synthetic nanocrystals. We will highlight concepts based on PEGylation and show how small deviations in the ligand shell alters the behavior in biological environment substantially. Moreover, we will present combinatorial approaches for the functionalization of the nanocrystals with biological affinity molecules to improve targeting specifity and concepts to optimize the physical properties of the inorganic core to increase the sensitivity for the respective imaging techniques.