Abstrakt
Surgical resection remains a major treatment strategy for solid tumors. Intraoperative tumor identification based on brightfield imaging is the most common technique employed but alternatives are emerging. Recently, fluorescence-based techniques have proven themselves to be a promising and effective approach for intraoperative cancer detection. Affinity-based unquenched probes have already reached the market while activity-based quenched probes dependent on activation by tumor-associated proteases are still under investigation.
Here, we report development of a polymer-tethered fluorescently quenched probe based on a previously reported small-molecular imaging agent. We presumed that conjugation of this small molecule to a biocompatible macromolecular carrier would offer many advantages, such as limiting unwanted lipophilic interactions or cancer tissue accumulation thanks to well-described EPR effect. The macromolecular scaffold also allows us to further tune features of the probe to obtain desired properties.