Zhen Ye1,2, Xueming Wu2,
Mingqian Tan2, Zheng-Rong Lu2
1Department of
Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake
City, UT, United States; 2Department of Biomedical Engineering,
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, United States
This study designed, synthesized and evaluated a novel biodegradable polymeric MRI contrast agent with high kinetic stability for clinical cancer diagnosis using contrast-enhanced MRI. The new agent showed high relaxivity and good degradability in vitro. The MR contrast-enhancing effect of the new agent was evaluated on mice bearing orthotopic 4T1 breast cancer tumor. Our in vivo preliminary results demonstrated the agent was able to generate significantly prolonged and higher tumor enhancement than clinical agents. The novel contrast agent is of great clinical potential for MR cancer diagnosis.