Objective
The leading cause of morbidity and mortality in developed nations is vascular disease such as cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular disease. The process common to these diseases is atherosclerosis, and in particular, the formation of vulnerable plaques those rupture and cause thromboembolic disease1.
Therefore, there exists a need to develop a non-invasive strategy that can detect and assess vulnerable plaques prior to plaque rupture that can provide both high-resolution anatomic and functional information with a high degree of sensitivity and specificity. Myeloperoxidase (MPO) has been identified as a marker of active inflammation in vulnerable plaques.
Elevated plasma MPO concentrations have been found in stroke and myocardial infarction2. Thus, MPO i s evolving as a key molecular and clinical biomarker of vulnerable plaques. The Weissleder group has recently developed a novel approach for imaging peroxidases using low molecular weight paramagnetic enzyme substrates3.
The overall goal of this proposal i s to develop and test novel activatable molecular imaging agents that can sense MPO activity in vivo, and to expose the candidate to state of the art molecular imaging techniques in an integrated multidisciplinary environment.
These "smart" agents harness enzyme-mediated amplification and are potentially much more sensitive than alternative targeted agents. We hypothesize that MPO substrates are converted into highly reactive self-polymerizing intermediates that give oligomers with high relaxivity.
Preliminary data have shown that these novel agents can be used to report enzyme activity by MRI and nuclear medicine. 1. Libby P. Nature 2002;420(6917):868-874. 2. Brennan ML et al. N Engl J Med 2003;349(17):1595-1604. 3. Chen JW et al. Magn Reson Med 2004
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineneurologydementiaalzheimer
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineradiologynuclear medicine
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinecardiologycardiovascular diseasesarteriosclerosis
- engineering and technologymedical engineeringdiagnostic imagingmagnetic resonance imaging
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineangiologyvascular diseasescerebrovascular diseases
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Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2005-MOBILITY-6
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
OIF - Marie Curie actions-Outgoing International FellowshipsCoordinator
MADRID
Spain