报告内容简介

A variety of molecular platforms including small molecules, peptides, aptamers and nanoparticles have been explored for molecular imaging of diseases. Melanin is a natural dark pigment that can be found in most organisms. In malignant melanoma, melanin formation is highly increased and therefore it can serve as a promising molecular target for melanotic melanoma imaging. Imaging probes that either are involved in the melanin biosynthesis pathway or have high affinities with melanin have been developed for melanin targeted imaging. We will present our research on developing benzamide analogs for melanin targeted PET imaging. More interestingly, melanin can serve as a target for multimodality imaging of diseases including PET, MRI and photoacoustic imaging (PAI). Tyrosinase, the key enzyme in melanin production, was thus explored as a novel reporter gene for PET/MRI/PAI trimodality imaging. Lastly, besides serving as a biomarker for melanoma intervention, melanin nanoparticles can also be developed and used as a new multimodal nanoplatform for biomedical applications. Our recent research progress on these directions will be discussed in this talk.

报告人简介

Dr. Zhen Cheng is an Associate Professor of Radiology and a member of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS), BioX program, Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection and Stanford Cancer Center. He currently leads the Cancer Molecular Imaging Chemistry Laboratory of the MIPS where he is developing novel molecular probes especially PET and SPECT probes, non-invasive imaging techniques and bionanotechnology for the multimodality early detection of cancer. Dr. Cheng has published over 160 peer reviewed articles, 8 book chapters, and he is a co-inventor of 14 patents. Dr. Cheng is the President-elect and Chair of Board of Directors, Chinese American Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, and he was the Board Director of the Radiopharmaceutical Sciences Council in the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. He has served as a reviewer for numerous funding agencies including NIH, DOD, DOE, German Research Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, etc. He has also served as an active reviewer for over 100 research journals such as Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, Science Translational Medicine, JACS, Angewandte Chemie, JNM, etc., abstract reviewer and session chair for numerous meetings (SNM, WMIC, etc.). Moreover, he is Associate Editor of Frontiers in Biomedical Physics and Regional Editor of Current Molecular Imaging and sits on the editorial board of numerous peer-reviewed journals.