"We've developed a way to take non-invasive images of very early plaques, before they're detectable by any other means," says Samuel A. Wickline, M.D., professor of medicine and biomedical engineering and one of the study's senior authors. "This same technology, we think, will allow us to detect very early cancers and other inflammatory events as well."
Patrick M. Winter, Ph.D., research instructor of medicine and first author of the study, presented the team's results Nov. 19 during the Russell Ross Memorial Lecture and New Frontiers in Atherosclerosis at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2002 in Chicago. Gregory M. Lanza, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine and biomedical engineering, is co-senior author.
Wickline also presented an overview of molecular imaging and nanotechnology at the Molecular Basis for Cardiac Imaging session.
Atherosclerosis the progressive hardening of arteries results from the accumulation of plaques in key blood vessels. In order for plaques to form, a crowd of smaller vessels, called capillaries, must develop around the diseased site.
In this study, the team used a relatively new imaging method developed primarily at Washington University to label growing capillaries, thereby identifying locations where plaques are about to form. They loaded an extremely small particle roughly 200 nanometers long, called a nanoparticle, with about 80,000 atoms of gadolinium, which shows up as a bright spot on a magnetic resonance image (MRI). Other carriers for gadolinium hold only a few such atoms at a time, and therefore result in less brigh
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Contact: Gila Z. Reckess
reckessg@msnotes.wustl.edu
314-286-0109
Washington University School of Medicine
19-Nov-2002