Abstract

NEWLY DEVELOPED APPLICATION OF NIR DYES IN CANCER TARGETING AND IMAGING: A REVIEW

Nitin G. Dumore*¹, Mangesh H. Hingankar², Pravin K. Bhoyar³, Kruti L. Meshram³

ABSTRACT

The development of multifunctional agents that could be used for simultaneous tumor targeting, imaging and treatment is a major goal in cancer research and is expected to contribute significantly tithe realization of personalized oncology. Recently, significant progress has been made on the development of unique NIR dyes with tumor targeting properties. Fluorescence imaging uses a sensitive camera to detect fluorescence emission from fluorophores in whole-body living small animals. Cancer NIR molecular imaging relies greatly on the development of stable, highly specific and sensitive molecular probes. Organic dyes have shown promising clinical implications as nontargeting agents for optical imaging in which indocyanine green has long been implemented in clinical use. Recently, significant progress has been made on the development of unique NIR dyes with tumor targeting properties. Very recently, natively multifunctional NIR dyes that can preferentially accumulate in tumor cells without the need of chemical conjugation to tumor targeting ligands have been developed and these dyes have shown unique optical and pharmaceutical properties for biomedical imaging with superior signal-to-background contrast index. The main focus of this article is to provide a concise overview of newly developed NIR dyes and their potential applications in cancer targeting and imaging. The development of future multifunctional agents by combining targeting, imaging and even therapeutic routes will also be discussed. We believe these newly developed multifunctional NIR dyes will broaden current concept of tumor targeted imaging and hold promise to make an important contribution to the diagnosis and therapeutics for the treatment of cancer.

Keywords: cancer, NIR, fluorophores.