(443g) Engineering Fluorescent Nanoparticles for Early Cancer Detection

Diagnosing and monitoring cancers have been developed extensively during the last two decades to detect cancer cells early. However, most of the approaches diagnose the disease at the advanced stage when the biomarkers are overexpressed on cancer cells, or circulated in the patient’s blood. We propose to develop a fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) based nuclear sensor for the early detection of cancer cells by imaging and analyzing the structural alterations of the cell nuclei. A comprehensive computational database on the pattern of DNA malfunction is going to be used to track any symptoms of a healthy versus risky nucleus at an early stage using these FRET based imaging agents.