Greetings! My name is Antonio Benayas. As some of you can perhaps remember from a previous post , I am a postdoc at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, working to develop novel near infrared nanoprobes part of Professor Fiorenzo Vetrone’s group. It is the right time to summarize what has been accomplished during my term as CIHR-BCSC fellow.
Accordingly to our job at the academic research stage, my contribution is to develop a pool of … let us call them “discreet spies”! Ultra-small entities (nanoparticles) adapted to inject in to humans and can effectively navigate through the blood stream. They will be able to report the presence and evolution of tumors, in a non-invasive way (harmlessly emitting light). In this multi-lane “assembly line” inside the nanomedicines´ factory, the multidisciplinary group led by Prof. Vetrone is setting the chassis, transmission, and wheels. All those pieces are not called upon in a “common car”, but in a very customized one for cancer imaging and detection.
When our role is done, we passed the vehicle to the next workstation (in other words, communicating it to the scientific community). Then is the time of physicians/oncologists to test the different vessels provided, and to pick up the best among them to move ahead to clinical implementation, step by step. Although my combat takes place in a battleground far away from the bedside of cancer patients, I firmly believe it is very important to keep digging at the basic science level. That way, we provide those closer-to-the-cancer-patient researchers with the best possible weapons to map the extinction of the disease, advancing the fight against it. I am glad to inform you that our published results has advanced the state-of-the-art towards low-dose in vivo nanoprobes successfully tested in mice. Moreover, several kinds of “spies” also show the capacity to measure the temperature of their surroundings. That key feature has indeed allowed our best nanoprobes to carry out a real-time monitoring of heat-based eradication of superficial tumors on live specimens, thus avoiding any damage to healthy tissues around the tumor.
But there are other kinds of assets and progress that I would like to share with you. First, throughout my BCSC-funded term, I devoted my best efforts to set up a cutting-edge microscopy facility* in the relatively young group of Prof. Vetrone at INRS. That in-house tool expands the possibility to test at the cellular level our nano-spies right after we synthesize them. Like in any other human endeavor, workflow efficiency is important. In a different note, we have created new forums to share with the pure Materials Science community, the relevance of body-penetrating near-infrared wavelengths. We are bringing additional minds and resources to the joint venture of pursuing a better non-invasive imaging of breast cancer and other diseases.
Finally, my aim guiding these few lines is to also emphasize what will remain after my departure. In fact, the team I helped to assembly will work further on getting better nanoprobes “to spy” for the appearance of (breast) cancer tumors. In that regard, I have been fortunate enough to mentor and work, shoulder to shoulder, with well-trained and highly motivated young scientists such as Riccardo Marin and Artiom Skripka (picture above). They now carry the torch, and I foresee more exciting results to come that will help the crusade against breast cancer.
Thank you to BCSC for your trainee support!
– Antonio Benayas (Ph.D.),
Postdoctoral Researcher (Eileen Iwanicki Fellow 12/2013-11/2016; CIHR-BCSC)
(*) That venture was undergone in close cooperation with a small but very ambitious Canadian optics company (Photon Etc.).
