Led by Stefan Wilhelm, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma‘s Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering, a team of researchers from OU’s Gallogly College of Engineering, OU Health Sciences Center, and Yale University recently published a paper in ACS Nano that describes their development of advanced imaging platform technology to improve understanding of how nanoparticles interact with cells.
As technology and engineering capabilities in healthcare continue to increase, scientists and engineers are developing new technologies to improve the future of healthcare. One of these areas, nanomedicine, examines the use of nanoparticles for the delivery of drugs into the body to fight infectious diseases or cancer.
The analysis of these nanomedicines in cells, tissues and organs is done by optical imaging, which can have good image resolution. New imaging technologies are needed to visualize nanoparticles in their 3D context within living tissue.
“To look at nanomedicine in biological samples, researchers use either electron microscopy, which provides excellent resolution but lacks 3D imaging capabilities, or optical microscopy, which provides beautiful 3D images, but provides very low resolution,” said Wilhelm.
“We demonstrate that we can make a 3D representation of a biological sample with the resolution of electron microscopy. This technique, called high-resolution imaging, allows us to see nanomedicine inside the cells of its any.
With highly innovative imaging techniques, we can begin to track and analyze nanoparticles inside cells, which is essential for the creation of safe and effective nanomedicine to target specific cell regions.
The researchers applied a high-resolution 3D imaging technique known as diffusion microscopy that involves embedding cells into inflatable hydrogels. Like the absorbent material used in diapers, hydrogel materials physically expand up to 20 times their original size when mixed with water.
“This expansion allows imaging of cells with an angular resolution of about 10 nanometers using an optical microscope,” said Wilhelm. “We combined this method with a method for imaging metal nanoparticles in cells.
Our approach exploits the inherent ability of metal nanoparticles to propagate light. We use scattered light to take images and measure the number of nanoparticles in cells without the need for additional nanoparticle labeling.
The authors suggest that advanced imaging platform technologies can be used to engineer safe and effective nanomedicine to promote translation of these technologies into the clinic.
Source: University of Oklahoma
