Apr 13 2015
Teri Odom of Northwestern University will present a seminar at 3:30 p.m. Monday, April 13, in CHEM 144 on gold nanostar probes for imaging and therapeutics.
Nanotechnology offers new strategies for minimally invasive and localized approaches to diagnose and treat diseases. Recently, 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 affect cancer cells at the nanoscale. The focus will be 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. Also to be discussed is the mechanisms of cell death associated with these unique therapeutic nanoconstructs.
Odom is the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. She is an expert in designing structured nanoscale materials that exhibit extraordinary size and shape-dependent optical properties. Odom has pioneered a suite of multi-scale nanofabrication tools that has resulted in, for example, the discovery of a new type of "dark" surface plasmon in nanoparticle arrays and realization of the first plasmon nano-laser based on electromagnetic "hot spots." She has also invented a class of biological nanoconstructs that are facilitating unique insight into nanoparticle-cell interactions, such as how nuclear deformations induced by drug-loaded agents may be correlated with cell death.
Odom has received numerous honors and awards, including being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry; a Blavatnik Young Scientist Finalist; the Carol Tyler Award from the International Precious Metals Institute; a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard University; the ACS Akron Section Award; an NIH Director's Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health; the Materials Research Society Outstanding Young Investigator Award; the National Fresenius Award from Phi Lambda Upsilon and the ACS; the Rohm and Haas New Faculty Award; an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; a DuPont Young Investigator Grant; a National Science Foundation CAREER Award; the ExxonMobil Solid State Chemistry Faculty Fellowship; and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering.
Odom was the first chair of the Noble Metal Nanoparticles Gordon Research Conference, whose inaugural meeting was in 2010. In addition, Odom was an associate editor for RSC's flagship journal Chemical Science (2009-2013) and is on the Editorial Advisory Boards of ACS Nano, Chemical Physics Letters, Materials Horizons, and Nano Letters. She currently serves as executive editor of the new journal ACS Photonics (2013-).
Source: http://www.uark.edu/