Abstract
Imaging keeps pervading biomedical sciences from the nanoscale to the bedside. Connecting the hierarchical levels of biomedicine with relevant imaging approaches, however, remains a challenge.
Here we present a concept, called “3M”, which can deliver a question, formulated at the bedside, across the wide-ranging hierarchical organization of the living organism, from the molecular level, through the small-animal scale, to whole-body human functional imaging. We present an example of nanoparticle development pipeline extending from atomic force microscopy to pre-clinical whole body imaging methods to highlight the essential features of the 3M concept, which integrates multi-scale resolution and quantification into a single logical process.
Using the nanoscale to human clinical whole body approach, we present the successful development, characterisation and application of Prussian Blue nanoparticles for a variety of imaging modalities, extending it to isotope payload quantification and shape-biodistribution relationships.
The translation of an idea from the bedside to the molecular level and back requires a set of novel combinatorial imaging methodologies interconnected into a logical pipeline. The proposed integrative molecules-to-mouse-to-man (3M) approach offers a promising, clinically oriented toolkit that lends the prospect of obtaining an ever-increasing amount of correlated information from as small a voxel of the human body as possible.