Student: Isabel Ramos
1st supervisor: Rene Botnar, King’s College London
2nd supervisor: Ajay Shah, King’s College London
In this PhD project we propose to (1) evaluate 19F labelled nanoparticles for the selective Imaging of Inflammatory cells (e.g. macrophages, monocyte.) after Ml, (2) investigating the merits of an elastin and collagen binding contrast agent for imaging extracellular matrix remodelling. We have recently received a pump priming award from the Medical Engineering Centre at King’s College London that allowed us to purchase a 19F/H coil and 19F nanoparticles that will be crucially important to perform the inflammation imaging experiments of the proposed project. We also have industry collaboration with Lantheus Medical Imaging that will provide us with the elastin binding contrast agent, ESMA. In addition we have developed tropoelastin and collagen specific contrast agents with the help of BHF and Wellcome Trust funding that also will be available for this project. For the initial experiments we plan to use an established murine model on left anterior descending artery ligation that leads to a myocardial infarction that has been well characterized and extensively used by out group for both imaging and biological investigations.