A systems approach to engineering cancer nanotechnologies

therapy. Over the past three decades, advances in nanomaterial synthesis have produced impressive nanostructures with unique electromagnetic and therapeutic properties. These represent a powerful toolkit of building blocks through which multi-component nanosystems could be constructed. Yet, while biological systems produce higher-order functions through coordinated interactions between multiple nanoscale components, biomedical nanotechnologies to date have largely lacked systems-scale complexity. Considering that typical in vivo doses of diagnostic or therapeutic nanoparticles exceed I trillion nanoparticles, there is considerable opportunity to construct multi-component, interactive nanoparticle systems that perform sophisticated new functions in vivo. This thesis takes a systems approach to engineering cancer nanotechnologies, where interactions between multiple nanoparticle populations are designed to generate emergent system properties for enhancing the sensing and targeting of cancer cells. In the first section of this thesis, direct nanoparticle interactions are engineered to produce emergent properties for cancer sensing. Three classes of magnetic particles are developed that respectively enable: MRI detection of single cancer-associated proteases, performance of logical AND/OR operations using two cancer-associated proteases, and reversible sensing of antagonistic kinase/phosphatase enzyme pairs.

Department dc:contributor.department

Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Von Maltzahn, Geoffrey

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sangeeta N. Bhatia.

• Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/58387

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/58387