Enable Early and Sensitive In Vivo Detection of Liver Metastasis by Protein-based

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The major barriers limiting the application of MRI to detect small liver lesions and metastasis at the early stage and patient selection for targeted therapy based on molecular imaging of disease biomarkers, are due tothe lack of desired MRI contrast agents capable of enhancing the contrast between normal liver tissues and tumors with high relaxivity, tumor targeting, high intra-tumoral distribution and no toxicity. The low sensitivty related to low relaxivity of the current clinically approved contrast agents has posted additional limitations to the further application of MRI to monitor the effect of metastasis treatment, including image-guided laser ablation. To address the critical need, We (Dr. Jenny J. Yang's team in Atlanta) have developed a novel class of protein-based MRI contrast agents which exhibit significant improvement of both r1 and r2 relaxivities compared to the clinical MRI contrast agents, an improvement in in vivo dose efficiency in mouse models,