Using nanomagnets to enhance medic...( nt properties and high contrast. In add...),Health

nt properties and high contrast. In addition, they might be modified to act as "smart" materials whose contrast could be turned on only when bonded to a target molecule or cell. Toxicity is not believed to be an issue, because iron is naturally found in the body and other studies have found that these materials are non-toxic at the concentrations used in MRI.

NIST works with Florida State University to make single-molecule magnets less than five nanometers (nm) in diameter, and works with the University of Colorado at Boulder to make nanocrystals in the 10-50 nm range. The agency is pioneering methods for manipulating and measuring the magnetic properties of these compounds and is developing instrumentation for understanding how contrast agents work and how to control contrast properties. Researchers correlate the measured properties to the observed MRI response under non-clinical conditions using imagers at The Children's Hospital in Denver. The information gained is fed back into recipes for making even better nanomagnets. The work described in the new paper was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

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Contact: Laura Ost
laura.ost@nist.gov
303-497-4880
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
1-Feb-2007

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