Simplified Synthesis and Characterization of Magnetoferritin for Convection Enhanced Delivery

Veronica Clavijo Jordan¹, Michael R. Caplan¹, Kevin M. Bennett¹

Convection-enhanced delivery has been proposed to deliver agents with very high specificity to the brain to detect malignant tumors, but the technique requires high-relaxivity agents for detection. Because these agents must be delivered by convection, they must also have size ranges similar to biological molecules. Here we developed a procedure to synthesize magnetoferritin from commercially-available apoferritin, with a 96-fold increase in relaxivity over native ferritin. The nanoparticles were made monodisperse and the proteins perfusion characteristics were compared to targeting peptides intended for CED. This makes it practical to use magnetoferritin for CED to detect malignant glioma cells with MRI.