Single-Nanoparticle Sensors of Nano-bio Interactions
Prof. Teri Odom, Northwestern University
Nanotechnology offers new strategies for minimally invasive and localized approaches to diagnose and treat diseases. For example, nanoparticles have been explored in a range of applications, including as drug delivery vehicles, imaging probes, and therapeutic agents. Although increased therapeutic efficacy has been realized, direct visualization of how engineered nanoparticles interact with specific organelles or cellular components has seen limited attention. Such interactions will have implications for fundamentals in cancer biology as well as in the design of translational therapeutic agents. This talk will describe how drug-loaded gold nanostars can behave as multi-spectral optical probes for interrogating how therapeutic nanoconstructs interact with cells at the nanoscale. We will focus on model cancer cell systems that can be used to visualize how gold nanostar nanoconstructs target cells, rotate on the plasma membrane, are endocytosed, and are trafficked intracellularly. We will also discuss mechanisms of cell death associated with these unique therapeutic nanoconstructs.
Teri W. Odom is Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Associate Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) at Northwestern University. She is an expert in designing structured nanoscale materials that exhibit extraordinary size and shape-dependent optical properties. Odom has received numerous honors and awards; select ones include being named a U.S. Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow; a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard University; an NIH Director's Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health; the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award; an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; an NSF CAREER Award; and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. She is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, Materials Research Society, and Royal Society of Chemistry and is on the Editorial Advisory Boards of ACS Nano, Chemical Physics Letters, Materials Horizons, Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry, Chemical Society Reviews, and Nano Letters. She serves as founding Executive Editor of the journal ACS Photonics (2013 - ).