Magnetic protein microspheres as dynamic contrast agents for magnetomotive optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging biomedical imaging modality that has been developed over the last 15 years. More recently, OCT has been used for the intraoperative imaging of tumor margins in breast cancer and axillary lymph nodes providing a real time in-vivo assessment of the tissue morphology. Traditional OCT images are limited by only being able to observe morphological structures. As diagnostic medicine continues to push for earlier detection, one must develop functional imaging modalities that would detect molecular information in-vivo allowing a real-time microscopic analysis of the tissue specimen. A novel modality of OCT called magnetomotive-OCT (MMOCT) has been developed by our group, employing an induced modulated magnetic field with a magnetic contrast agent to create the added contrast to structural OCT images. Modified protein microspheres with a BSA protein shell functionalized with RGD peptide sequences for targeting and an oil core have been designed and synthesized. Magnetic nanoparticles (Fe₃O₄) and Nile Red dye have been encapsulated into its oil core. These microspheres have previously been demonstrated to target cancer cells by functionalizing them with a layer of RGD peptides and could be functionalized with monoclonal antibodies. Preliminary results show that these magnetic microspheres, which are 2.0-5.0 microns in size, are readily detectable under MM-OCT when embedded in a 5% agarose gel, in a 3-D scaffold of macrophage cells previously incubated with the microspheres, and when injected in-vivo into a tumor from an NMU-carcinogen rat animal model for breast cancer.