Medical Physics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Medical Physics, including details on medicine, radiotherapy, biomechanics, medical imaging.

Multicolor quantum dots for molecular diagnostics of cancer.

Smith AM, Dave S, Nie S, True L, Gao X

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.

In the pursuit of sensitive and quantitative methods to detect and diagnose cancer, nanotechnology has been identified as a field of great promise. Semiconductor quantum dots are nanoparticles with intense, stable fluorescence, and could enable the detection of tens to hundreds of cancer biomarkers in blood assays, on cancer tissue biopsies, or as contrast agents for medical imaging. With the emergence of gene and protein profiling and microarray technology, high-throughput screening of biomarkers has generated databases of genomic and expression data for certain cancer types, and has identified new cancer-specific markers. Quantum dots have the potential to expand this in vitro analysis, and extend it to cellular, tissue and whole-body multiplexed cancer biomarker imaging.

Published 3 March 2006 in Expert Rev Mol Diagn, 6(2): 231-44.
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