Grant: Alliance Grants

Treating soft tumours is exceptionally difficult because of their invasive nature and blurred boundaries. Radical and safe resection is crucial for increasing patients' survival and correlates well with patient prognosis. Despite substantial efforts to distinguish between neoplastic and healthy tissue at the resection margins, it is still challenging to have complete surgical removal of tumour tissues due to its diffusely infiltrative nature and poor imaging differentiation. New technologies and materials are urgently needed to more accurately contrast soft tissue tumour masses to achieve complete tumour resection. Our project aims to develop two technologies, Aptamer-assisted Fluorescence-Guided Surgery (AptaFGS) and Aptamer-guided MagnetoDynamic cell disruption therapy (AptaMagTx) and two materials, Aptamer-modified Silicon Quantum Dots (AptaSiQD) and Aptamer-modified Magnetic Nanoparticle Reagent (AptaMagRx), targeting intraoperative brain tumour localization and margin assessment, elimination of diffused tumour cells and disseminated metastases for disease extent. We plan to combine silicon quantum dots (SiQDs) with anti-cancer aptamers to make a new quantum material, AptaSiQD, for Fluorescence-Guided Surgery of brain tumours. The aptamers will be labelled with exceptionally bright and stable SiQDs and verified on resected brain tumours and co-registered with pathological margin assessment. The ability of AptaSiQD to image primary and metastatic tumours in preclinical brain tumour models will be tested by an in vivo imaging system. Finally, we plan to combine magnetic nanoparticles with anti-cancer aptamers to make a new magnetic material, AptaMagRx. It will be exposed to the alternating magnetic field at the tumour site to selectively destroy tumour cells. The magnetic field of this frequency causes the nanoparticles to oscillate and kill the tumour cells without additional heating, thereby sparing adjacent healthy cells and tissues.