Functionalisation of ultra-bright all organic nanoparticles for super resolution imaging in intact brain preparations

Description du projet

Les nanoparticules pourraient bientôt éclairer les processus pathologiques

Les nanoparticules, matériaux de moins de 100 nanomètres dans au moins une dimension, ne sont pas nouvelles. La nature a créé tous les types de nanoparticules présentes dans les cendres volcaniques, la suie, les embruns océaniques et le sable. Les fourchettes en argent sterling libèrent même de petites quantités de nanoparticules d’argent dans l’environnement. Exploiter le potentiel des nanoparticules artificielles pour des applications biomédicales dans les cellules humaines repose sur la satisfaction de certaines exigences très strictes, notamment la stabilité, la non-toxicité et la fonctionnalisation. Le projet NanoFUNC, financé par l’UE, concentre son attention sur les nanoparticules électroluminescentes entièrement organiques pour l’imagerie biomédicale. Afin de s’assurer qu’elles éclairent des cibles d’intérêt, les scientifiques fonctionnalisent les nanoparticules les plus prometteuses pour suivre les récepteurs des neurotransmetteurs dans des tranches de cerveau vivant. Le succès devrait conduire à des nanoparticules brevetables pour une variété d’applications de bioimagerie.

Objectif

Nanotechnologies have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of devastating diseases such as cancer or neuropathologies. By combining light-emitting nanoparticles (NPs) and super-resolution imaging, it is possible to observe living tissues at the molecular scale, resulting in images of unprecedented detail. To this aim, the ideal NP should be bright, stable, small, spectrally relevant, versatile, targetable, and non-toxic. These features have been sought after by chemists, physicists and biologists alike for more than a decade but their presence in a single NP has not been achieved to date. The objective of the NanoFUNC project is thus to develop the next generation of NPs displaying all the above properties.
We propose to achieve this by conferring targeting properties to the latest all organic NPs of the host laboratory already displaying promising spectral characteristics. We will first validate the functionalisation of these new tools on model cellular systems before applying them to track neurotransmitter receptors deep in intact brain slices of healthy and schizophrenia rat models. We expect this project to impact all communities benefiting from advances in bioimaging including neuroscience, medicine and cell biology as a whole. We thus envisage to patent the obtained NPs for use in marketable bioimaging applications.
The transfer of knowledge between the expertise of the host in nanochemistry and that of the experienced researcher in neurobiology provides a unique opportunity to successfully complete this highly interdisciplinary project. Moreover, the mobility of the researcher back to France in an internationally renowned laboratory is sure to enhance her career prospects as she aims to become an independent researcher in the near future. Together, the host and the researcher will strive for excellent scientific results and build a career plan involving training, management and communication to bring the researcher to full professional maturity.