Direct magnetic characterization of individual nanoparticles for optimized diagnostic imaging

Project Summary ODMR Technologies Inc and Prof Victor Acostaandapos s group at University of New Mexico UNM are developing a diamond chip platform capable of direct magnetic characterization of individual nanoparticles for optimized diagnostic imaging Our team is a spinoff from academic collaborations in the emerging field of diamond photonic sensors a field we helped create nearly a decade ago After years of refining this technology in the lab we are ready to commercialize our most promising devices Magnetic nanoparticle MNP research has seen a flurry of activity in recent years owing to potential applications in catalysis data storage biosensing medical imaging including magnetic resonance imaging MRI magnetic particle imaging and magnetic relaxation imaging MRX drug delivery and hyperthermia treatment These applications would benefit from using MNPs with highly uniform composition size shape and magnetic properties However MNP production is notoriously plagued by reproducibility problems inaccurate specifications and a lack of common practices Tools for quantitative magnetic measurements of individual nanoparticles are not commercially available Advanced characterization tools are often either inaccessible due to cost and maintenance or simply do not exist If the cost accuracy versatility and throughput of proposed instruments can be improved they could have a dramatic impact on MNP applications Developing a diamond chip platform for high sensitivity parallel characterization of individual MNPs is the focus of this proposal The magnetic hysteresis and relaxation properties of thousands of individual MNPs will be simultaneously characterized using a magnetic microscope based on nitrogen vacancy NV color centers doped near the surface of a diamond chip The magnetic measurements for each individual MNP will be correlated with its composition and morphology as determined by high resolution transmission electron microscopy Unlike existing techniques the proposed platform works at ambient conditions and offers high throughput andgt individual particles per min To date we have built a setup designed for imaging particles with nm core diameters In the proposed research plan we will optimize the benchtop prototype for nm sized particles Our goal is to build a benchtop magnetic imaging apparatus with T sensitivity in nm resolved pixels mT tuning range and andgt frames per second Next we will characterize the magnetic dynamics of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles SPIONs with nm diameter with a goal of improving their applicability in biomedicine We will obtain hysteresis curves and magnetization decay curves with record throughput Correlative TEM and magnetic images of numerous individual SPIONs will be obtained and may finally unambiguously elucidate the relationship between SPION size shape magnetization relaxation and hysteresis curve properties Project Narrative The goal of the proposed research is to develop a new type of sensor for direct magnetic characterization of individual nanoparticles at ambient conditions and with high throughput andgt individual particles per min Our characterization tool may be used for refining the fabrication process of magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical imaging diagnostics and therapeutics and may be the enabling technology that propels the field toward clinical applications In the longer term the technology may be used for high throughput sorting of individual nanoparticles based directly on their magnetic properties